Work by more than seventy graduating senior art and digital arts students will be exhibited in 2015 Spring Storm: Department of Art 3rd Annual Senior Show on Friday, May 29, from 5-8 p.m. in Lawrence Hall, 1190 Franklin Boulevard, on the UO campus. A reception for the artists will also take place from 5-8 p.m. during the exhibition, which is free and open to the public.

Spring Storm will showcase work from all media areas within the Department of Art, including ceramics, digital arts, fibers, jewelry and metalsmithing, painting, photography, printmaking, and sculpture. The event is a rare peek inside what students in their senior year have accomplished. 

Above: Visitors to Spring Storm gather in one of the exhibition spaces in Lawrence Hall. Photograph by Cody Rappaport.

“Spring Storm is a celebratory one-day exhibition that transforms Lawrence Hall into a site of creative energy,” says Charlene Liu, associate head of the Department of Art. “The exhibition highlights the unique works of our graduating art majors and exemplifies the multifaceted approaches in contemporary creative practice.”

The show will provide not only a glimpse of advanced student work but also insights into their creative processes, material choices, and theoretical approaches.

Graduating senior Claire Christy says she is “greatly inspired by nature and seeks to capture the experience of being both immersed and separated from it.” She does that through printmaking—using intaglio, woodcut, lino-cut, lithography, chine collé, and, more recently, screen printing.

She says she hopes her work “stirs the viewer’s curiosity and challenges them to look for hidden details that you can only appreciate if you are consciously looking at your surroundings. I also hope that they are able to take away a sense of wonder, awe, and a desire to adventure,” she says.

Above: Metamorphosis 1, digital collage, 11” x 17.” By Kendall Wagner.

Kendall Wagner digitally produces “surreal collages that relate to the female body and organic materials,” she says. Her process begins by exploring archives of photography on the Internet, “looking for figure photography that is nontraditional or has the model configured in some strange pose. I also am looking at X-ray photographs of flowers. I cut these out with Photoshop and change the color profiles of each component of the collage so they all match. I then compile everything into Adobe Illustrator,” she says.

Wagner notes that “It’s difficult to get the pre-notions society has placed in our minds about the female body out of my head as I create these collages, but I want the images I create to solely focus on the nature of the human figure and its biological relation to the organic matter that surrounds us every day. I want viewers to see my work and to take away the idea that the human body is just another organism that derives from nature, as trees and flowers and everything else derives from nature in a similar way.”

Danielle Lopez works in interdisciplinary media—sculpture, painting, drawing, and fibers. She characterizes her work “as an exploration of women's stories and the idea of ‘high fantasy,’ which is a phrase I use for the amplified, over-the-top feminine ideal that women are faced with on a regular basis.” 

She works initially by establishing a “color story” for each piece that helps portray her theme or idea. Also elemental to her work is repetition “because it's connected to the idea of women's work and craft. I'll develop an idea and find a way to use repetition. I also like using my body when constructing a piece of artwork, whether it's weaving or building a sculpture out of paper. I'm always interested in how artists use their bodies to create their work.” In her weaving, she also explores various structural and sculptural elements.

A print-on-demand catalogue archiving the work of this year’s graduating class will also be available.

For two weeks following Spring Storm, a juried selection of student works will be shown June 1-15 in the Selected Senior Show exhibition in the LaVerne Krause Gallery in Lawrence Hall. The opening reception will take place Monday, June 1, from 5-7 p.m. in the gallery.

The Department of Art at UO offers more than 300 classes every year in eight media areas. Many courses in the department are open to students who are not art majors, although prerequisites may apply.

Above: growth/loss, weaving, 27” x 12.” By Danielle Lopez.

Above: Waiting for you, etching on paper, 17 ½” x 23 ½.” by Claire Christy.