The annual LSU School of Art First Year Graduate Student Exhibition featured a wide variety of personal art projects by first-year MFA students and was on view in Barnes Ogden Art & Design Complex Gallery.
The MFA students presented their art in a mix of mediums from pottery to painting to digital art from Oct. 31 to Nov. 14. A free reception held on Nov. 7 opened up the gallery to celebrate the artists’ works and allow the public a chance to ask questions.
Alivia Davis, an MFA candidate featured in the exhibition, said the reception and physical exhibit allowed her art to connect with the public.
“It was since hearing people’s feedback on what they thought about the exhibition and my work, so I thought it was valuable,” Davis said. “I want my work to be meaningful to people outside of myself. It’s nice to have my work in a physical space like that.”
Davis’ two paintings in the exhibit reflect themes of transformation. She used a combination of gouache and watercolor paints to create vibrant illustrations of humans and creatures. Inspiration for her work drew from Greek mythology, the natural world and her real life experiences.
In addition to allowing outsiders to connect with their work, the exhibition also presented the MFA candidates as a unified group of artists in one gallery. For Ian Sumrall, another first-year MFA candidate, this was an important aspect of the showcase.
“I think it gave us the opportunity to actually showcase our work and have us all be in one room so that we’re all kind of shown working together on this one thing as first years,” Sumrall said.
Sumrall specializes in creating digital artworks. For his digital painting “Cowboy Warhol,” he decided to take a less serious approach than in some of his other pieces. This piece was created using procreate on an iPad and features a raunchy cowboy riding a banana.
Sumrall said his digital painting is a campy self-portrait that falls into a larger series of his works entitled “Homosensual,” which comments on societal views surrounding homosexuality.
“I was kind of taking things a little seriously, and I wanted to take a little bit of a more campy approach,” Sumrall said. “I’ve always been more fond of art that is more revealing. I really had fun working with this one, and I got to kind of work out of my comfort zone a little bit, because I hadn’t done a digital painting in such a long time.”
Edem Dake, a first-year MFA student, also used technology in her multimedia collage displayed in the gallery. Dake participated in an independent study program over the summer where she experimented with photography and printing on fabric strips.
Dake photographed other graduate students and used a unique photographic printing formula called cyanotype to print a light blue collage of her photographs onto strips of white fabric. Her collage was inspired by the idea of photography as an incomplete perception.
“Overall I would say I’m interested in the idea of the photograph as a fragment that is one step removed from reality,” Dake said. “It’s also subjective, because it’s taken by a photographer so the representation within the image is from that person’s perspective, what they choose to include or keep out.”
Dake had to lean into the scientific process of photographic printing and developing with cyanotype. The strips that make up her artwork are previous attempts to reach the right exposure necessary for a larger-scale piece she created.
“I think it was nice to see how even with things that would have been considered scraps, I was still able to put them together into something meaningful or like have them in conversation with each other when I think about the photograph as a fragment.”
Like Davis and Sumrall, Dake also felt that having their art displayed together in the gallery was significant. Similar to her own collage, the exhibit was an interdisciplinary creation in itself.
“It is nice seeing my work among work by my peers,” Dake said. “We didn’t make the work with each other in mind. It was just kind of a collision, so to speak. It was nice to see the different ideas and approaches come together for the show in that sense.”