CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Krannert Art Museum and the School of Art and Design will display the work of graduating seniors in art and design. The School of Art and Design Bachelor of Fine Arts Exhibition opens May 9, with a public reception from 5 to 7 p.m. The exhibition will be on display in the East and Gelvin Noel galleries through May 17.
This annual show allows family members and the community to see the studio art and design work that students have been creating. It will include work from a variety of disciplines, including photography, graphic design, painting, sculpture, metals, industrial design, new media, art education and art history.
“This annual spring exhibition is an opportunity for us to showcase the work of our highly accomplished students, many of whom will go on to become recognized leaders in their field,” said Nan Goggin, the director of the School of Art and Design. “Their work is a source of great pride for the faculty who have watched them develop and mature as artists.”
Sixty-eight seniors will exhibit 139 art and design objects in the show.
Mason Pott, a senior in painting, is one of the student coordinators of the show. He said the show will represent what students have been working on during the past year, but it’s not strictly a thesis show.
“Often students choose work from their thesis, because that is what they are most confident in and what they have spent the most time and effort on,” he said.
Pott will show a 5-foot by 3 ½-foot painting he created for his senior thesis. It originated from a computer scan of his face, which he made for fun but also to see what it looked like. He scanned his face several times, moving it around until the image was very obscure.
“Then I did some computer manipulations of that image to continue to skew it, and then eventually started painting that image,” Pott said. “It’s definitely pretty weird. It’s a portrait, but only in part, because things are stretched and kind of melting and obscured in one way or another.”
Pott is interested in how humans see the world versus how machines do, “and how people are very quick to believe a photograph,” even though it can easily be manipulated.
“I like to make paintings that are very obviously digitally altered, to take this misconception and bring it to the forefront of what people are looking at,” Pott said.
More information about the exhibition, which is sponsored by the museum and John and Alice Pfeffer, is available online. The museum website includes a complete list of exhibiting artists, an image gallery and links to the online portfolios of many of the students.