Department of Visual Arts

VA Students Impress in Annual Juried Student Show

by Daniel Ng

If you haven’t yet wandered the halls of the Harris Fine Arts Center recently, you’ve missed out.

Not only do you get a workout walking up and down the flights of stairs, but you also can feast your eyes upon semester-ending artworks created by the school’s visual art students.

This year’s juried 2011 Visual Arts Student Show in the Harris Fine Arts Center included studio art, illustration, and graphic design works of various shapes and sizes.

Designed as a way for students to bolster their portfolios and show visitors and the university their work, this year’s Student Show included pieces ranging from redesigned magazines to paratroopers dragging on wood.

As an added incentive for students to enter the show, award money was also handed out for prizewinners with the “Best of Show” recipient garnering $400 and honorable mention recipients receiving $50 each.

Studio art major, Noah Coleman, won “Best of Show” for his work titled, Drag. The award came as a major surprise for him after seeing other the works that were in the display.

“It’s not the most ambitious piece in the show in my opinion,” Coleman said. “It’s kind of nice to see that it was appreciated.”

Coleman’s piece consisted of a toy paratrooper being dragged around by a metal rod on a wooden surface.

He designed the piece thinking that the dragging of the paratrooper’s feet on the wood would make an interesting acoustic sound, and the indentations made from the constant motion would be aesthetically pleasing. But the judges saw something entirely different as they observed and critiqued the work.

“I actually talked to one of the judges the other day,” Coleman said. “He said that one of the things that did it for him was the political content that he saw in it. I wasn’t trying to make a political statement with the piece. But I liked that he was able to pull that out. I like that somebody can see something totally different from what I saw while I made the work.”

That creativity and the ability that art has to touch audiences in many different ways is also one reason graphic design student, Hang Lee, enters her works into various shows.

“When you design something, you actually create something,” Lee said. “I enjoy the fact that I can create something out of nothing and make it pleasing and appealing to viewers in different ways. I just enjoy being creative ─ that’s the bottom line.”

Lee entered her re-creation of the lifestyle and fashion magazine, SOMA, and its design layout into the show and took third place.

“We get to redesign a real magazine of our choice as part of our portfolio,” Lee said. “We bring it to a completely new and different style or art direction while maintaining the characteristic of the magazine.” It took Lee quite awhile before she settled on SOMA. But once she saw the magazine, she was hooked on improving it.

“I wanted to do something that had to do with culture, life, and fashion,” Lee said. “I went to bookstores and looked at various magazines. With SOMA, when you just look at it, it’s a really interesting word. It’s not a normal English word; it intrigued me. Also, the design was really bad so I thought I could pull out something that was a lot nicer.”

Another project entitled, Sherman Alexie Box Set, that was created by graphic design student, Laura Barlow, received an honorable mention. The piece was inspired by Barlow’s love of the author’s novels.

“He is one of my favorite authors,” Barlow said. “I have a total fan-crush on this guy. He is such an amazing writer and has such good intent in everything that he writes.”

According to Barlow, the work is a collage of Alexie’s books as she tries to bring to life the personality and touch of Alexie’s writing style.

“He talks a lot about what our idea of Native American culture is from a white cultural perspective versus what it really is. He speaks to a lot of people who are from the outside looking in.”

After completing the project, Barlow realized that her box set was one of her best creations.

“I think it’s because I felt so passionately about what the author communicates,” Barlow said.

For Barlow, Lee, Coleman and other award recipients, the goal from here on out is to use their successes in the Student Show as a catalyst and springboard to bigger and better opportunities.

“Depending on who jurors the show, if they really like something, that can open up opportunities for you such as showing at different galleries and having different people see your work,” Coleman said.