CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Graduate students in the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign School of Art & Design are exhibiting their work at Krannert Art Museum.
The School of Art & Design Master of Fine Arts Exhibition presents work that is the culmination of the students’ graduate education. It includes eight students in studio art and industrial design. The exhibition opened April 11 and runs through April 25.
Samantha Jones has a background in metalworking, jewelry design and digital fabrication from her undergraduate education. Her graduate student work is sculptural 3D collages.
Jones said she is interested in examining the hypersexualization and commodification of young Black girls. Her project, titled “Everything Must Go,” is a storefront filled with nostalgic items that Jones has packaged. The title refers both to a sale to clear out a store’s merchandise and to “the things we have to give up and the ways we are consumed as women,” she said. “The whimsy, the lightness that young girls have gets pushed back or traded away.”
Jones collected trinkets and knickknacks that remind her of her girlhood, such as Barbie clothes. They are packaged in bags that Jones made from laser-cut material. The bags also contain strands of hair, referencing the Victorian-era practice of hair art.
Jones said the items have little significance or value, but collecting and packaging them as products gives them significance in their representation of girlhood and nostalgia. “The value is in the memory,” she said.
She also created a series of 4-foot-long replicas of checks from the “Bank of Jones,” all dedicated to things she has had to give up, she said. One reads: “Pay to the order of the male gaze, for the cost of my autonomy.”
Anthony Obayomi is a documentary photographer, filmmaker and visual artist from Lagos, Nigeria, whose work centers on social justice and the preservation of cultural heritage. Obayomi is a National Geographic Explorer and Storyteller.
His documentary work has included projects examining the inadequate housing and homelessness of university students in Lagos, for which he won a 2017 National Geographic Portfolio Review Prize, and a 2020 protest by Nigerian youth against police brutality.
“Images can expand a story, give more perspectives and stand as material evidence against people who would deny that such violence exists,” he said.
His installation for the exhibition, “Reflections/ing from/on a sun-filled classroom,” is an experimental classroom through which he reflects on his own education and raises questions about the metrics with which we measure the world and how they might be reimagined to evaluate a future world that we want to see.
The mixed media installation includes five blackboards painted using classroom materials; abstract sculptural objects made from rulers, scales and globes; and a paper sun collage, 5 feet in diameter, that Obayomi made for the scenic design of a “New Awakenings” concert at Krannert Center for the Performing Arts. The scales are covered with images of lottery numbers that are seen on charts created by Nigerian shop lottery keepers. Patrons try to detect patterns that will help them choose the next winning numbers, he said.
Obayomi said he hopes his work starts conversations and inspires change.
Emily Tomlinson created a minimalist installation that reflects her interest in cataloguing and indexing, and in collecting found objects.
Her drawings, which are mostly text, are from observational studies she does outdoors, where she takes field notes on what she sees; from lists of objects, such as the contents of a toolbox; and from philosophical ideas involving fractals, the concept of infinity and the Richardson effect, in which the measured length of a coastline varies according to the scale of measurement.
Tomlinson uses her laptop screen as a lightbox and traces her notes, replicating Arial font and using imagery in the form of punctuation and symbols, often drawing on found paper. She hung the drawings using devices she made from found objects such as rocks, nails and steel rods. She also drew labels that mimic the format that the museum uses.
One of the drawings, hung near the doorway to a storage area that only museum staff can access, reads “On this side of these doors,” and another asks viewers to “Please consider what’s on the other side of these doors.”
Tomlinson said she wants viewers to consider in a new way things they might easily overlook and to take a more tactile approach to reading and see ideas in object form.
The other students whose work is in the exhibition are Oriana Crutcher and Grey Dey, both in studio art, and Jose Cabada, Justin Kim and Fengzhuo Shao, all in industrial design.
Editor’s notes: More information about the School of Art & Design Master of Fine Arts Exhibition is available online. For information about Krannert Art Museum, contact Evelyn C. Shapiro at esha@illinois.edu.
