The BA/BFA Senior Exhibit opening reception in the Baum Gallery gave prospective senior art students the chance to display their most meaningful work to family and friends.
Baum Gallery Director Brian Young said the Senior Exhibit is a cumulation of the seniors’ work as both students and artists at UCA.
Young said the exhibit gives students a chance to display their work in a real gallery setting and allows them to get comfortable showing their work.
Among the pieces on display were installations, paintings, drawings, sculptures, ceramics and photographs.
Fourteen BFA and BA seniors had their works on display.
Senior BFA student Kolby Black displayed his pink and blue ceramic plates depicting
male nude figures from gay pornography, a work he called “Family Dinner.”
Black said he was inspired by his experience with the separation of body types
within the gay community.
He chose his figures based on their idealized body types and altered them so they
depicted multiple body types.
Black said he remembered going to his family’s house on Thanksgiving and wondering
if his sexuality made anyone uncomfortable.
“I’m serving my own insecurities and other people’s insecurities about homosexuality for dinner,” Black said.
He said his work is intended to portray different meanings for both the gay and straight communities.
“For the gay community it’s like ‘oh this is really beautiful, but we also do really weird things to ourselves,’” Black said. “For the straight community it’s like ‘oh I’ve never seen this before, this is something I’ve never witnessed.’”
Black said the floral pink and blue background of the plates was designed to force
people to look at it and be shocked by it.
“I want them to have that reaction because whether or not they want to they’re
going to have to think about that piece for the rest of the evening,” Black said. “I like
that idea of let’s draw them in and show them something they’ve never seen before.”
Black won exhibition honors and was nominated for excellence in exhibition.
BA senior Kaelyn Suarez’s digital print “Stretched Thin” depicted a woman’s face
and her environment being pulled apart by tangles of bright color.
“It’s like, whenever you feel like you have too much to do and there’s just an
overload of things going on you feel like you’re stretched, like you’re falling apart,”
Suarez said.
Suarez’s other two digital prints “Collide” and “Headspace” were about decision making.
She also had another set of pieces representing her job at Walmart on display, created with charcoal and chalk pastel on cardboard.
Three depicted a woman pushing a shopping cart with a plastic sack over her head.
“When I’m at work I’m just mad because I hate it, grocery stores try to look clean with their ads and stuff but they’re a mess,” Suarez said.
Suarez said she wants people to try and relate by depicting feelings in her work, even if they’re personal.
The exhibit is on display until Dec. 7 and will host a weekend reception on Nov. 19
from 2-4 in the Baum Gallery.
