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Home Arts & Culture Nine Senior Art Students Present BFA Senior Thesis Exhibition

by Chris Wilson

 

Nine students in Concordia’s art education, graphic design and studio art programs presented their capstone work in the 2016 Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Thesis exhibition April 3-15 in the Marxhausen Gallery of Art.

“The whole show for each of us is a culmination of our four years of work, but over the last year, we’ve taken the things we are interested in and focused on, and we’ve narrowed in on specific areas and techniques to produce (the show),” Laura Sattler said.

This year, the seniors in the BFA program are Bailey Baker, Sarah Bowe, Sylvia Braun, Amber Deepe, Danielle Harstad, Austin Romine, Laura Sattler, Mitchell Volk and Micah Witt.

On April 10, the students invited the public to the gallery to talk about their work and their varying plans after this year, which include graduate school, internships, teaching and continuing at Concordia for another year.

During their sophomore year, these nine students applied to be in the BFA program. The art professors considered the students’ work, attitude, work ethic and ability to talk about their work when deciding whether to accept them into the program. Once accepted, the students had to take additional art credits and create work exclusively for the BFA show.

Professors Lynn Soloway, Don Robson, James Bockelman and Seth Boggs each mentored 2-3 students, providing critiques on the work the students were producing independently.

Each student worked with a central theme and various mediums to create work exclusively for the BFA show. Pieces were displayed on the walls, floor, from the ceiling and on a projector screen in the gallery. Each body of work included a written artist statement explaining the pieces or the artist’s creative process.

Sattler’s work, inspired by the Biblical book of Job, consisted of full-scale, disfigured bodies drawn with graphite.

“Through observation of human relationships, the study of the human form and experiences in Christian culture, it has become compulsive tendency for me to draw and centralize on the body,” Sattler said.

Volk’s work included news clippings of negatively connotated world events, such as an image of people being beaten while protesting South Africa’s new apartheid government, in which Volk replaced a policeman’s baton with a fish.

“I look at a lot of images, and basically what the work is based off of is seeing images and words that I have a problem with and using other images and words to make fun of it, like racism and conformity,” Volk said.

Bowe’s work was a collection of images generated by a computer algorithm, which she printed out and displayed.

“I have been interested in using chance over control as a method of design,” Bowe said. “And I am doing work that bridges a graphic designer’s wish to control everything and giving up control.”

The BFA show was displayed in the gallery through April 15 and was replaced on April 17 by the 2016 Annual Student Art Exhibition, which will be in the gallery through May 4.

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