From magazine sculptures and experimental video clips to digital prints and acrylic paintings, the senior art exhibit, “#Modernism,” in the Art and Interactive Multimedia Building on Friday, Oct. 19 was a diverse display of seniors’ recent work.
Students, faculty and family came out for the opening reception and to view the students’ creative take on modernism.
The seniors were given an assignment to create a piece of art which reflected their interpretation of modernism.
Many of the pieces had been inspired by artists from the modernistic era.
One senior artist, Bryan Borut, documented a social experiment based on a performance by artist John Cage, who sat silently for approximately four minutes, unsettling to the audience, before finally starting a musical concert.
Borut replicated Cage by standing on a busy street holding a sign which read, “use earplugs to experience modernism.”
“It’s more about the silence of the piece than the actual music,” Sarah Andresen, junior fine arts major, said referring to the original experiment.
“It’s experiencing the world in a new way,” Josh Sender, senior fine arts major, said of his classmate’s work.
Sender chose to play off Édouard Manet’s rendition of women for his own piece.
On a rather large canvas, Sender had sketched two women whose figures were barely there, but whose eyes were definitely drawn to capture the distinct gaze Manet gave his models.
Another film project, by Liz Gerger, mocked Cosmopolitan magazine through an eerie series of cutouts from the magazine, progressively moved and arranged with an unnerving high-pitched voice reciting advice which would be found in the magazine.
Three QR codes were made into art at the exhibit as well. Senior artist, Ryan Beebe, created three digital prints of well-known websites — Twitter, Pinterest and Facebook. When scanned, the QR codes read, “This is not a conversation … This is not a corkboard … This is not a relationship,” respectively.
His piece was a play off of René Magritte’s painting of a pipe where he painted “This is not a pipe” in French under the pipe.
“#Modernism” was a successful exhibit with the variety of art pieces drawing in inquisitive onlookers.
The exhibit will be on display in galleries 111 and 119 until Dec. 16.
