On April 30, the Fine Arts Department held a senior gallery that featured drawings, painting and photography.
“The Dialogue Renewed” and the “Once Again, With Feeling” exhibitions showed off the BFA senior’s final projects.
The “The Dialogue Renewed” exhibit presented the drawings and paintings with a total of 41 paintings ranging from oil on canvas to ink on charcoal paper.
Paintings like “License & Registration” by Johnny Castillo, a 5 x 5 feet oil painting on canvas caught the eyes of many spectators. It was also a collaboration with photographer James Doyo.
“Those glasses look real,” said Alec Milan who stumbled upon the exhibit. “It’s crazy and I like the detailing and shades.”
The “Once Again, With Feeling” exhibit was a photography gallery that featured “Left Behind” by Gabriel Gonzales and “Political Theaters” by Lizzie Moo. These projects were photography stories that were displayed separately in their own halls.
Gonzales dedicated this gallery to his siblings after losing them to COVID in March 2021. “Left Behind” photo story features photos from his past and out of focus photos in the present right behind these photographs.
“A lot of it was how I felt in the moment when they passed, because we spent so much time in the house together and we had this really close relationship with each other,” said Gonzales. “So when they passed, I got really upset. More angry than sad because damn dude, they really just left me here to kind of do everything by myself.”
The gallery revealed 12 photographs from Gonzales’s childhood and presents photographs that are out of focus right behind them.
“It’s out of focus now because things don’t seem as clear as it once did,” said Gonzales.
“I wanted a very specific emotional response that I don’t think I would’ve been able to get and getting the space by myself was really important.”
Gonzales wanted his gallery to be isolated because of the emotions he felt during his project. The feeling of isolation and loneliness was a major theme in this body of work.
“I just really appreciate that a lot of people are responding to it really well and positively,” said Gonzales. “I put a lot of effort into this and putting it together and there were days when I would just sit down at home and cry because it took an emotional toll on me.
“For the work to have done that for me, I was hoping that it would go through the people and it has, and getting the positive response was very satisfying.”
Lizzie Moo’s gallery “Political Theaters” highlighted the theatrics of politics, a completely different concept from Gonzales. She also wanted to include the theatre scene in the gallery.
There were four photographs and three conceptual art pieces that displayed today’s world of politics.
“My work is basically about the theatrics of politics and I like to bring the theatre to the gallery in order to reinforce that concept,” said Moo. “The curtains are progressively more and more ridiculous and undone and falling apart as kind of pointing to how things kind of feel like they are falling apart with politics constantly.”
The BFA exhibits will be open until May 4. It’s located in the galleries between Fine Arts 3 and 4 and next to the art store.