Six Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) students from the ART 480 seminar will be taking their art beyond campus this week.
They created an exhibition to keep on display at Big Rock Coffee and Events in Chesaning, starting this week on March 31. The exhibit will remain there until April 10 as a free and open-to-the-public showcase.
The show will end in a 6 to 8 p.m. reception on April 10. During the reception, the artists will be available to talk about their pieces and the meanings behind them.
There will be multiple media on display at the exhibit, including painting, drawing, graphic design, ceramics, and photography created by Alex Lorenz, David Andres, Jaden Gross, Quinn Navilynn, Faith Schuyler, and Rachel Wiercinski.
Lorenz, a senior graphic design and BFA in photography double major, will be featuring one drawing, one painting, and one photograph in the exhibit. His pieces are called “Evolve,” “Psyche,” and “My Love.”
Working with multiple media isn’t always the case at curated exhibits like this, and it’s proven to be challenging for artists in the past.
“It’s not been as challenging as I thought,” he said. “I started out as a drawing and painting major, then I switched to graphic design, and then I switched to double-majoring in photography. So it’s kind of just a natural progression, and I work between multiple media all the time.”
Lorenz focuses on photography in his work. His drawings and paintings are based directly on photographs he’s taken and collaged, which largely contain floral symbolism and imagery.
“I like to collage photographs together and then either draw or paint them, or just present them as a photographic collage,” he said. “It’s … showing things in a new perspective, kind of abstract, getting people to appreciate the things that are around them constantly by seeing them … in a new form.”
A goal of the exhibit was to mesh the artists’ styles, like Lorenz’s photography, to work cohesively with the others while still maintaining individuality.
“There are so many different themes within [the exhibit] because everybody’s kind of pursuing their own thing. Because I’m graduating and I’m having my own BFA show at the end of the semester, I’ve been working everything towards that thematically,” he said. “That’s something that we had to deal with … everybody’s doing slightly different things.”
The six classmates saw this as both a challenge and a strength as they worked together to curate the collection.
“It was kind of interesting because I personally have only gone through selecting my own pieces to put in a group show,” Lorenz said. “So it’s an entirely different experience trying to navigate this. We had to find the space ourselves. We have to determine which pieces we all did that we think will look good together as a group.”
Doing this exhibit now will likely set up more options for these students in their future careers as artists.
“It’s … a new experience for me and for everybody else involved,” Lorenz said. “A lot of stuff we do in this BFA seminar is trying to set us up for success in the future, so we have the tools to be able to collaborate with other people to do a group exhibition, like contacting media and resources to get our names out there.”
Not only will this project get the artists’ names out, but they have also gained skills by navigating the process that will serve them later.
“We worked really hard, putting this together,” Lorenz said. “I think it is important to note that, in this project specifically, our professor is entirely hands-off. We did all of the planning. We did all of the communication. It’s an entirely student-led thing.”
The students setting this project up entirely meant contacting the venue and fully curating their collection into something they were proud of for viewers to enjoy.
Big Rock Coffee and Events is open Tuesday through Friday from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. and on Saturdays from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.
