The semester is coming to a hectic end, students are finishing up their final projects and soon to be graduates are turning in their senior theses.
For BFA in Photography students, this means exhibiting their work in the student art galleries next to the art store. It’s senior week at the galleries, and students are making their final artistic statements before graduation.
13 photography students have taken over the two rooms of the Gatov Gallery, displaying a wide range of their interpretation of the theme “Misplacement,” a theme agreed upon by the students showing this week.
Works range from abstract collage-style photos to exhibits that reflect race and sexuality.
Senior photography student Liliana Ramirez chose to capture the photographic process by focusing her piece on sound.
“My body of work deals with the relationship between image and sound, you can make an image into a sound or a sound into an image,” Ramirez said. “I was playing with the idea that a camera is almost like a computer in that it makes something into an image, and if that’s the case then what else can we make images with?”
Using a combination of sound editing software and Photoshop, Ramirez’ pieces include visual representation of her spelling out the word “photographic” and the shutter on a camera.
Dominick Chavez is showing brightly colored collage-style images that he calls still life constructions.
“One thing I like to think of these [pieces] as is some sort of visual trickery,” Chavez said. “This places the idea of what a photograph really is, sort of pushing the medium.”
He used photo deposits with a combination of software editing.
“Most of what you see here is what’s in front of me, it’s hard to say what was brought in later and what was there originally,” Chavez said.
Avery Sanders has numerous large photos of himself spread across the 10-foot wall. The same photo of Sanders is repeated multiple times, but in each photo there are stickers of targets placed in different places on his body.
“Each image — there’s 27 images — represent each African American that was unarmed that was shot by a police officer in 2016,” Sanders said. “The targets represent where they were shot.”
27 victims were people living all across the nation, and each were fatally wounded by the gunshots. Sanders says visitors to the gallery have called his project heavy, painful and stunning.
“That’s kind of what I wanted to get at, just to show people that this is happening, that people are dying by police officers that are suppose to be protecting and serving us and instead they’re killing us.”
The only exhibit that comes close to matching Sanders’ shock value is Matthew Chan’s series that speaks to the influences of dominant culture, which Chan describes as emasculating and tokenizing. His photos don’t only display archetypally beautiful naked women, but nude photos of himself.
“It’s an opportunity for me to challenge myself and challenge the norm; It’s a way for me to liberate myself,” Chan said.
He says his piece aligns with the theme by reflecting on the misplacement of his identity; the dominant culture tears down his inherent culture, taking away his identity.
Chan’s artist statement describes how media often portrays Asian males as being an ignorant, meek, mystical villain. He uses a Shaolin Monk character in his photos as an example of how Asian males often have their sexuality stripped away.
There are several other exhibits that also make senior week at the art galleries worth seeing, and the window of opportunity is closing. The exhibit will close its doors for good tonight at 5 p.m.