Today: Mar 29, 2024

Art Students On Campus Will Have their Final Projects on Display In Buley Library

Donovan WilsonReporter

It is tradition that senior art students at Southern have their final projects on display in the Buley library art gallery. This year will be much the same. 

“It is really fantastic that we have an entire gallery to use as our laboratory,” said Jeffery Slomba, sculpture professor. 

Slomba is currently teaching ART493, the capstone course for studio art majors. The course specializes in teaching students how to conduct themselves and their work professional for an art gallery or display. This all culminates to each student picking one piece of art that goes on display in the gallery’s student exhibition. 

Slomba said “there are 11 students in the course and they specialize in different concentrations of art”. 

This course currently consists of 11 students and their concentrations range all over the place to make for a diverse group of pieces. The concentrations included in this year’s exhibit will be Painting, Photography, jewelry and metal, sculpture and printmaking. The goal is to represent all the different areas of art southern offers to its students. 

The art exhibit will be opening on May 1st. The studio art students, in addition to the graphic design students, will be participating in an undergraduate conference that day to coincide with the opening of the gallery. The gallery will then run for the next two weeks until May 13, or through finals.  

“Everybody in the class has a few works that really represent them and what they do,” said art studio major Chelsea King, a senior. 

King focuses her studio art major towards printmaking. For her gallery contribution, she is presenting art books which are bound together pieces of printmaking and watercolors and all include some sort of unique interactive element. The biggest difficulty with her pieces are the interactive element as they encourage the viewer to touch and play with them but that is rather frowned upon in galleries regardless, let alone during COVID-19. 

King said, “Having the art gallery on campus makes it a lot more accessible to a lot of people”. 

The art gallery is located on the bottom floor of the Buley Library. Every other time of the year besides May, the gallery is home to multiple other galleries featuring  the university’s vast collection of art. Over the years, Southern has accumulated all sorts of art from different ethnicities and cultures and time periods and puts them on display based on a theme every month or so. 

“I am a sculpture major, and the work I plan on displaying is all 3D and represents my love for mixed media. I am showing work made with nylon, sheep’s wool, wood, hydrocal and recycled material and textiles,” said studio art major, Zina McBride, a senior.  

McBride focuses her studio art major towards sculpturing. The sculptures she will be presenting in the gallery pertain to themes of loss, mending, intestinal forms and homages to her Romanian heritage, according to McBride. The pieces of her collection to get picked are up to the group process of determining which pieces make the best cohesive gallery. A large component of this capstone class revolves around that idea as the class is majorly supposed to teach the students what working in the professional environment of studio art is going to be like. 

McBride said, “What goes into the final exhibition is working together to plan out how we will be setting this show up cohesively in the gallery. I am so looking forward to how this will all come together in the actual space and how we will experience everyone’s work as we walk through the gallery.” 

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