Vibrant colors, immense woodcarvings and intimate photography fill The Linfield Gallery. These eclectic works by five Linfield art students comprise the 2010 Thesis Exhibition, titled “Face to Face.”
Seniors Dominic Rieniets, Meghan Meehan, Anthony Kordosky, Matt Statz and Joy Nelson said the exhibit represents coming face to face with their artwork and bringing others face to face with their surroundings.
For Rieniets, the thesis was a cathartic experience to cope with the loss of a friend.
“It’s a commemoration of my friend who died in an accident this summer but was able to donate seven organs to nine people,” he said. “I came up with a playful kind of way to express a serious topic for me.”
Rieniets created seven nonfunctional, brightly colored puppets, which he called proxies.
Each proxy represents someone who received an organ. Finding only vague information about the organ recipients — males, ages 25-52, blood type B positive — Rieniets said the ambiguity allowed him freedom with his work. They are clothed, big-headed figures with glassy eyes, and each proudly displays his surgical scars, according to Rieniets’ artist statement.
“Some of them kind of creep me out,” he said.
The proxies’ placement in the gallery has as much meaning as the figures themselves.
“Each figure is seated on its own pedestal, suggesting the disconnect they all have from each other. The pedestals are clustered around an empty center,” Rieniet’s artist statement says. “The center is left empty to honor the donor’s absence, which is the only thing holding them all together.”
Meehan’s pieces are also about connections between people — in her case, the intimate relationship of two lovers.
“I just kind of got naked with my boyfriend and [started] taking pictures,” Meehan said. “Then it came out to be this really raw narrative about relationships and intimacy.”
The narrative plays out in a series of black and white photographs mounted in a cluster on one of the gallery walls. They zoom in on Meehan and her boyfriend through abstract camera angles, sometimes from Meehan’s point of view.
“I want the viewers to ask the questions. Who are these lovers? What is their life like outside of the camera lens?” she said in her artist statement.
Meehan said that her photos and Kordosky’s woodcarvings stand out amid the bright colors of the other artwork. Kordosky’s pieces are immense woodcarvings that feature organic and geometric shapes engraved into three large, circular slabs of wood, naturally bordered by bark.
“Basically my prerogative was sort of to take a raw material I could find from the Earth and see if I could transform it into fine art,” he said.
And Kordosky, who usually works with clay, said he was happy with the end result.
“It’s definitely a sort of stepping stone to me; I mean, this is the first time I’ve shown work in a gallery that I’ve been happy with,” he said.
The last two students both created long series of pieces. Statz painted 29 vibrant portraits of Linfield students he said he didn’t know or didn’t know well.
The oil paintings are different than Statz’ past work, which often comprised larger paintings.
“I did see it as the culmination of the skills I had worked on and kind of the mental creative process,” Statz said. “But it’s definitely shaking up the working process.”
Each portrait took four hours to paint, according to his artist statement. Statz painted each person on a couch in Meehan’s house. In his artist statement, Statz wrote that the paintings document the experience of becoming acquainted with each person during that time.
Nelson’s work is a series of photographs documenting her and others picnicking in unusual places, such as an attic or a graveyard. Nelson said her photographs are about coming to terms with everyday surroundings.
She said the photos are a bit ridiculous but meaningful, presenting a theme of relationships similar to those found in her usual medium: painting.
“I think with my paintings it was more a connection of humans to nature. But in the photos, it’s still a relationship of people to their environments,” Nelson said. “I think the piece is really about exploring new spaces.”
And while what physically hang on a wall in the gallery are her photos, Nelson made one thing clear: “Picnicking is the art; photos are the documentation.”
Overall, the artists said they were pleased with the exhibit and were surprised at the resulting cohesiveness of displaying their individual artwork together.
“Face to Face” runs through May 28. The gallery, located in the Miller Fine Arts Center building B, is open Tuesday through Saturday noon to 5 p.m.
Kelley Hungerford
Editor-in-chief
Kelley Hungerford can be reached at [email protected]
