By Paige Shermis
(1) Alexia-Renee Derkasch: Derkasch’s series White Barnacles, Burnt Barnacles and Cool Barnacles reflects, according to her artist statement, “human obsession and repetition.” The pieces are influenced by her Caribbean heritage, reflecting coral reefs and schools of fish.
“I quilled thousands of pieces of paper. I wanted to create something that was really, particularly in the white one, organic on the top and more pattern-oriented [on the bottom]. As I developed the series I enjoyed the patterns, while still having elements that were influenced by organic material under the sea. I created patterns as if they were schools of fish swimming, especially in the last one,” she said. 32,000 pieces of paper were quilled, or coiled and shaped, in total.
(2) Darya Tsymbalyuk: Tsymbalyuk’s painting series embodies the principle stated in her artist statement that “the body is a portrait of our inner realities.” Her paintings, which depict the human body twisted and bent into various poses, are entitled, in order from left to right, Songs X-XI, Songs V-IX, Song I, Song II, Song III and Song VI.
“I had [the models] pose for me alone in a room when I was not there with a time lapse camera taking a shot of every second of their movement. I just invited friends to express themselves through gesture. After winter I came back and painted,” she said.
(3) Ville Matias Lampi: Lampi’s piece Here is an Empty Sky combines media that one wouldn’t expect: an HD digital video loops on a television and a spotlighted oval of sand, over which a second HD digital cartoon video loop is played, all overlaid with quoted text from The Litte Book of Unsuspected Subversion by Edmond Jab?s, a famed Jewish poet.
“I started doing this work sort of as a personal exploration into my own memories. I studied abroad in Amsterdam the first semester of my junior year, more than a year ago. I feel like a lot of my friends were here and a lot were at home at the time and I was connecting with all of these people that were not actually in Amsterdam and I realized that it was through technology. And I was thinking about how I could read back those emails and check back the chat histories. This piece is about how we remember through taking photos, through chatting, through writing emails. It’s mainly about how we see technology as memories these days, and what we lose when we view them as memories,” Lampi said.
(4) William Udell: Udell’s pieces in his An Understanding of the Habitual series are mechanical, mobile, and repetitive. “I think that they’re all supposed to be a consideration of gestures that I encounter on a very habitual level, something that I’ve done over and over. I’m trying to step back from that experience and try to consider more than an unconscious gesture and something that has a more meaningful motion. That’s why I like setting a machine out to make motion for me. It gives me a chance to consider what is actually happening,” he said.
(5) Ferrell Garramone: Garramone’s paintings are about painting. “They’re about history painting, and the gaze, and they’re about the identity of flesh; things that are tangible, things that operate outside of gender, and they’re also about being in a studio,” she said. Her series includes five paintings, Ferrell I-II, Tiresias I, and Ferrell III-IV; Tiresias is the only self-portrait.
(6) Lindsay Lynch: Lynch’s colorful Pandaemonium! consists of a series of nine prints which were printed at least five times each. Lynch chose 27 of the 26 x 40 linocut reproduction prints to display.
“My work is about structure and chaos. For me, as an English and Art double major, I’ve got weird obsessions with things that are really structured, and that generally gets focused on English, whereas art is more chaos and playing around with that structure,” she said.
(7) Edith Willey: Willey’s A Room of One’s Own is the ultimate self-portrait ﾗ without an image of the artist herself. “[A Room of One’s Own is] a mixture of things that I made and things that I found. Some of the things that I made were made with found objects. It’s just all this stuff that I collected over the course of the year, and some of it I’ve been gathering for a long timeﾅ that’s one of the fun things about it, you get to look around and see a lot of different things. The piece is about collecting and seeing the beauty in ordinary objects and unexpected places. It’s also definitely a self-portrait; it illustrates the way my brain works and the way I think. I think it says more about me than a painting of myself would,” she said. Willey’s 12 x 11 x 14 feet white walls are covered with found objects, graphite drawings, cut paper and gelatin silver prints.
(8) Tristan Neviska: Neviska’s five mounted sculptures, Back Porch, Attic Space, Wall of Plaques, Garage and Cedar Closet, are comprised of materials as variable as jewelry boxes, a turf rug, and a sable scarf. According to his artist statement, Neviska considers himself a “three-dimensional portraist.” 12
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