Victoria Tavera
Staff Writer
Jocelyn Arceo
Arts Editor
Senior studio art majors presented their culminating projects at this year’s Senior Art Exhibition, “A Room of One’s Own,” Tuesday in the Harris Gallery.
The exhibit features the work of eight seniors.
Cassidy Badua’s project features a piece of massive proportions that consisted of blown up birth control packets surrounding a large stuffed tiger.
According to Badua’s artist statement, the piece explores her personal experience as a young woman using oral contraceptives, with the tiger representing her strong personality yet childlike appearance.
“I decided to make the birth control packets exponentially large and multiple of them to represent the overwhelming and heavy responsibility it was for me to decide that it is more beneficial to have control over pregnancy than it was to put my body through unnatural changes,” she said in her statement.
This piece in particular was one of sophomore kinesiology major Alyssa Smiley’s favorites.
“Personally I think it’s very symbolic of college students and how they’re always tired and how sometimes they use supplements to suppress their feelings,” Smiley said.
Sara Crespo’s wall installation is similar in appearance to that of a jellyfish or a rainbow-colored cloud sticking out of the wall with translucent streams of color hanging down.
“This project is an example of my determination to hold onto the peace, hope and contentment that God has given me,” Crespo said in her artist statement. “Each step of the creative process from start to finish has been given to me through revelations – through dreams, intuition and advice from spiritual mentors.”
This piece stood out the most to senior business administration major John Ceja.
“I think it I can relate to this piece of art because it signifies who I am as a person because it has all of the colors of the rainbow. It has colors that represent me, like green, which is life, and yellow, which is happiness,” Ceja said.
Chanel Rodriguez is exhibiting three different pieces, one of which consists of a vibrant contrast between night and day.
In the center of the photograph sits a woman’s torso split down the middle to show the inner spine.
The right side portrays a vibrant orange background with a sun in the top corner and that half of the body fully intact, while the left side portrays the deep violets and blues of a night sky with the other half of the body much less intact, even missing a hand.
“I enjoy challenging the visual perspective by combining interchanging energies from happy-go-lucky values of nature to morbid symbolism, revealing an altered reality of chaotic life changes with stimulating visual content,” said Rodriguez in her artist statement.
Marissa Reyes said in her artist statement that the series she features in the exhibit explores themes of ideal beauty and relationships through the use of imagery from the Renaissance period.
One piece was titled “The Venus of Urbino,” which is a modern recreation of the original created by the Italian artist Titian, which portrays Venus, the goddess of love.
“In his painting, a nude Venus is portrayed as a soft and sensual woman, but in this recreation she is reimagined as a man in the image of my fiancé. The male nude has long been deprived of the ideals attributed to the female nude… This reimagining of Venus is meant to show that men can embody traits normally attributed to women,” said Reyes in her artist statement.
Reyes said her interest in art history has always been spurred by the way a painting can tell a story over time.
The exhibit will run until Feb. 27.
Victoria Tavera can be reached at victoria.tavera@laverne.edu.
Jocelyn Arceo can be reached at jocelyn.arceo@laverne.edu.
