Kelley Hungerford

“This show, it’s not all together,” junior Matt Statz said of his portfolio class’s exhibition. “It’s about highlighting each artist as an individual artist and not about finding relationships between them.”
Statz, along with juniors Meghan Meehan and Joy Nelson and senior Alex Maxson, opened the 2009 Portfolio Exhibition “Tangent” on May 7 in the Studio Gallery of the Miller Fine Arts Center.
The artists spent a lot of time developing the show’s title.
“We sat and wrote all these words on this wall,” Meehan said. “Then somebody said, ‘tangent.’”
Statz said his take on the title was that each student’s art deviated differently from a common idea.
“We’re all working from a basic interest in very human concerns,” Statz said. “We arrived at ‘Tangent’ because we felt that these were all tangents off this loose, nebulous, abstract concern.”
Nelson explained the title differently: Each artist went on a tangent from the work he or she produced at the beginning of the class.
“We all kind of started at a certain place [with our art] at the beginning of the semester and ended at a different place than we thought we’d be,” she said. “There really isn’t a correlation between all of our work except that we’ve all developed.”
The exhibit displays pieces that each student considered important from his or her portfolio class, Nelson said.
For Statz, his paintings attempt to make his work more conceptual and less skill-based.
“This is a body of work which represents the different paths my thinking has gone down this term,” he said.
His paintings depict figures, but each piece contains many ideas, he said, including attempts to give the figures life, incorporate cross-cultural and political commentary and portray narrative.
Statz said he is torn between representing people as individuals in his paintings and using humans as a vehicle for his works.
“I’m trying to figure out what direction I want to go in,” Statz said. “It’s all this process of figuring out what I care about.”
But his work sets no agenda, he said.
“It’s more just a presentation than a declaration,” he said.
Unlike Statz, Meehan said her photography is all about making a statement.
“[It’s about] the way we present ourselves to society and how it’s so manipulated or influenced by the media that we don’t know who we are anymore,” she said.
Meehan said she has taken hundreds of candid photos of the people around her since November. She said she was interested in what candid shots say about people.
Then, she printed the best and paired them.
“I created these imaginative relationships between people,” she said. “A lot of them don’t even know each other.”
Human interaction is the most important aspect of life, she said.
Meehan said her portion of the show has some correlation with Nelson’s.
“It relates to Joy’s, I think, because I think in a roundabout way we are trying to represent what a human is,” she said.
Nelson’s’ pieces are watered-down acrylic paintings of plants, but some of them contain small human figures, as well.
“I was trying to get across people growing and a metaphor for people’s personalities and how people grow,” she said. “I’m hoping to reflect the diversity of humanity through the diversity of plants.”
She said she’s unsure what she wants people to take away from her work. She said she herself is trying to answer that question as an artist.
“I don’t make it for the audience, but the audience is vital,” she said.
Her favorite part of the show, she said, has been displaying her work.
“It’s really nice to see my work up on a wall,” she said. “It’s a lot different than push pins in my studio.”
Nelson and Statz collaborated on one painting for the exhibit. The painting presents a figure emerging from a muddled mix of colors.
Statz said they worked on the canvas simultaneously and created it as they painted with no real forethought or rules.
“It was as much about the experience as the product,” he said.
Statz’s and Nelson’s paintings are physically inside the student gallery, while Maxson’s work lines the wall outside.
Her display is a series of six paintings with abstract backgrounds and symbolic figures in the foreground.
The images represent important aspects of her life, Maxson said. But, she said she wants her audience to relate to them in its own way.
“The message or theme is the idea of symbols and images and their meanings,” she said. “I want the viewers to look at the pieces and make a connection to themselves, whether it be a memory or something that is constant in their lives.”
Maxson said her art reflects who she is and what she sees in life.
Overall, the art students said they enjoyed the process of creating and displaying the exhibition, but that, as Meehan put it:
“Art is a lot of frickin’ work.”
The Studio Gallery is open noon to 5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday. “Tangent” is on display through May 30.