Senior art students begin showcasing final projects

The senior art exhibits began with art majors Emily Chamberlain and Theresa Stegall.

On display March 28 through April 1, their exhibits were featured at the Blackbridge Hall Gallery. Chamberlain’s exhibit was titled “Sum of Parts” and Stegall’s exhibit was called “The Sacred Feminine.”

“My exhibition is about power, both physical and psychological, in the sum of our parts. Our world, our lives, our very being comprises in tiny units,” Chamberlain wrote in her artist’s statement. “We have separated our world into continents, countries, states, towns and cities, neighborhoods, buildings, and rooms. The extent to which we compartmentalize is impossible to describe; our classifications are infinite.”

Chamberlain said every aspect of our existence is broken into units subconsciously.

“I am informed and inspired by these structures, both natural and artificial, and have paid tribute to them by creating individual pieces that find their unity through ordered grouping,” Chamberlain said.

Chamberlain said their purpose is not merely utilitarian.

“These forms also represent the beauty of natural geometry and structure as well as power and strength in numbers,” she said.

Chamberlain used fiber as a natural medium to create the forms in her exhibit because of its ability to be transformed into structural and sculptural pieces.

“All of the processes used, including the working the raw wool, felting, stitching, printing, dyeing and sculpting were labor intensive and time consuming,” Chamberlain said.

Chamberlain said light is another major element in her artwork and she uses the combination of light and fibers to create a detailed glow.

She is most touched by artists Anne Hamilton, Eva Hesse and Terry Winters.

“I am inspired by the mysterious environments of Hamilton’s mixed-media installations, and her ability to manipulate the viewer’s perception of mundane object,” she said. “I am also motivated by the work of Hesse, for whom the repetition of form was fundamental. I also found parallels in my work to that of Terry Winters, who makes ‘schematic references to the biological, astronomical, or architectural structure images’ as he invents hybridized images of life and phenomena.”

Chamberlain said that although she is inspired by the world in its natural state, her goal is to not focus on drawing inspiration from the natural world.

“Rather, I am using these ideas as points of origin to explore form and structure.”

Stegall’s “Sum of Parts” is an exploration of the ideas that shape our world.

“I want the viewer to appreciate the idea of these units on both the micro and macro levels, in the same way that we should be conscious of the structures which form our own lives,” Stegall said. “I want the elements of time, space and repetition to engage viewers and draw them into the environment and concept.”

According to Stegall, the main goal of her exhibit is to bring attention to the importance women play in religion.

“Some of the women in my show are well-known and still revered in modern religions. Others have been eliminated by more powerful societies, and their true meanings lay buried,” Stegall said. “Symbolism is attached to these deities as a visual key to their spiritual powers and roles. Yet over time, these symbols are lost, religions reform, and deities fade away, while new ones take their place.”

According to Stegall, she hopes to make the viewer recognize the tremendous impact women have had throughout the world and through time as religious personages.

After doing a lot of historical and cultural research on female dieties, Stegall dedicated each painting in her exhibit to a female diety.

“I found symbols that have been used to represent then in the past and added my own symbolism to make the women more relevant to a contemporary viewer,” she said.

Color as a symbol is abundant in Stegall’s paintings, particularly red.

“Red is one color found extensively in many of the paintings,” she said. ” I used this color to represent the femininity of each woman. Red represents the life giving aspect of menstrual blood. It stands for the cycles we [women] go through, and the life that we [women] are able to create in the womb.”

Stegall most admires contemporary and ancient artists, especially Ana Mendieta, and Judy Chicago.

“Mendieta is a contemporary artist whose work is similar to mine. She too wanted to draw attention to women’s role in religion,” she said. “Chicago’s feminist work in the art world and the central-core imagery in her paintings have done much to inspire the Feminist tone of my paintings.”

In her artist statement, Stegall said her hope is to make the viewers recognize the strong impact, worldy and religiously, that women have had.

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Apr 8 2005. Filed under Other. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry