2020 BFA Graduate Exhibition

Abdullah Albohlika

When the coronavirus started to spread earlier this year, we sacrificed our social trait to maintain public health and safety. As social beings who thrive on bonding, distancing was a huge blow that left us as empty shells; deserted, hollow, and tempted to break the rule set for us by our experts as one of the few weapons we can use to fight against this shapeless monster. Closed buildings and empty streets are evidence of our awareness of the situation. These Google Earth photos show how these frequently visited places are now abandoned. No people, no shared moments, nothing. Spaces as empty as some of us might feel in these tough circumstances.

Tori Allen

The work I have done over the past year was inspired by my interest in art history. My paintings call attention to the abstractionists of the 1950s such as Jackson Pollock and Helen Frankenthaler, and more modern painters such as Cecily Brown and Joan Mitchell. Just as those before me, an integral part of my work is both the size and physicality of the paintings. The large scale allows the viewer to lose themselves within the colors and textures presented. As an intuitive painter, my life informs my work, making it diaristic in nature. Although my paintings help communicate my personal experiences, I want them to evoke the memories of my audience as well.

Just as Mark Rothko once said, “I [too] am interested in expressing the big emotions-tragedy, ecstasy, doom…” I want to paint my humanity and allow a human reaction in turn. Unlike many before me, I have given names to my paintings, many of which are titles of songs that I connect with in relation to the work. I don’t feel that this takes away from the viewers experience but gives them an opening into my psyche. I found a voice through painting that others could understand and resonate with.

Jacen Doebler

Within my artwork, there are remnants of the energetic, blissful freedom, and wanderlust I had in my childhood. I harness those feelings in hopes to represent the essence of imagination but embrace and infuse it with the authenticity and individuality that current moments and changing mindsets bring to my work.

It is important to me to be mindful, understand, and document the thoughts and feelings that pass through me, so creating has always fulfilled that way of building a fuller sense of self.

Andi Grillo

Narrative is an integral piece in crafting relationships. It organizes knowledge, defines personal truths and shares experiences, allowing us to better understand our own connections within a community. Simple interactions hold a great depth and beauty, seen through everyday exchanges that so often go overlooked. Inspecting these more closely, it’s important to acknowledge how the impact of these small events change, especially with a person facing trauma, grief, and loss. The way modern Western and primarily white American society copes with death is rooted in avoidance and awkwardness. Those in grief are expected to move on quickly and return to normal life, and while they receive external support, most of it lacks the empathetic experience to relate. Numbness and desensitivity are no longer acceptable excuses for ignorance. Our society has taught us not to ask for what we need, but to bend and conform to fit molds, instead of it adjusting to fit us. Without adjustment, we can’t communicate properly, we can’t understand others, and they can’t understand us, all merely because people are afraid of discomfort. The rift caused by this lack of communication is the focus of my narrative. Ranging from small instances of awkwardness to overwhelming moments of discomfort. These pieces explore the various experiences of my ongoing healing process.

Jon Hopper

This project is focused on understanding what it is like to be human during this time of trial. There is no error. 

Living in two thousand and twenty has been a mind-bending experience. I have constantly wondered, “what does it mean to be alive?” The answer for me may not be short, but it is worthy; I will not know what is to come, I will not know how to feel, I may not know what to do. I will only have what I have seen, I will only have what I have experienced, and I will always have myself. 

This keeps me together, this keeps me grounded, this keeps me alive. I need to see the things around me to understand them. I need to interact with things to control them. I cannot do that in this time. I have been told to contain myself and this does not make sense. This seems unnecessary but it is not, it is crucial. 

Emalee Reid Hoyle

Many of the women in my family suffer from anxiety disorders of some kind and, I am no exception. Typically, it is something I ignore in my work, choosing to focus on presenting calming images that I could get lost in. This series however, is a delve into imagery I produce right after a panic attack, in the margins of paper as I begin to calm down. A form of introspection on the ever changing landscape of my anxiety.

To do this I employed several techniques I use separately, but never really together. Bright in your face colors, simple compositions, and character design. A culmination of simple techniques, to make the unpleasant palatable. In this, I hope to convey the starkness of a panic attack, and the calm after the storm.

The characters are waiting, for what I'm not sure.

Hannah Jarden

The series "Faces" is the second installment of a larger body of work, titled "Places & Faces". The project as a whole surrounds deconstructed images of the rainy small town that has so shaped me as a person, and the people that made their home within it and made me a part of their 'family'.

These are those people, their portraits printed, soaked, resurfaced, crumpled, destroyed, and rephotographed- abstracted beyond recognition and far removed from the memory I have of them. Their impact on my life, and their shaping of my identity as I move through adulthood, has been recreated in this work through the physical process of resurfacing and reshaping their own faces and identity. Still recognizable as portraits while being far removed from a realistic depiction, the work is as much a visual experience for the viewer as it was a mental and physical process for myself as an artist.

Jenna Judah

This work encompasses Northern American culture and its ideology that revolves around death. “What We Know” is part of a larger study in the search to discover and understand different cultures’ relationships, and sometimes disconnection, with death.  Living in Northern America I grew up with little knowledge of what is to come with death, as did others.  We as Americans (not all of course, but many) do not entertain the thought of the body remaining in the home for weeks after death, nor cleaning it, providing offerings, and so on.  Instead, I have observed a lot of symbolism trying to interpret the complexities of death.  Now, that is what I am doing: trying to make sense of us trying to make sense of it all.

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Huntress Keller

Through many mediums, I explore how internal experiences are reflected in the world around us. Much of my work aims to turn over our learned fear of feeling and expressing emotions. Emotions are messengers, leading us through the odyssey of life! It is so important to be in process with them. I enjoy making spaces where people can feel safe and comfortable, in the hopes that they might connect with themselves and others - to practice and to play. 

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Hannah Matykowski

This work focuses on color and the relationship that color plays with each other on a page. Each piece is connected by using the same colors, but with different hues of that color. I love playing with different colors and finding different relationships that can work well and bring out the image and the story that comes along with it. While all the prints look the same from the next set of colors, they all match each other with their color plates and the different elements that are being used in each piece.

My work is also focused on the relationship that I have with art during this time. How my mental state is playing with the different colors and how those colors tell a small story of my time while at home with my family. Each color has its own meaning to me, showcasing that through my prints, helps me understand my own mind. This is all fun for me, painting, seeing my artwork change from black and white to color, and the experience that I have gained from my schooling to use for the rest of my life.  

Jennifer McCloskey

Using my body as a drawing tool, I record the steps, positions, and movements performed in ballet class. My painting reflects the movements as they exist within my own body. I explore the invisible connections and interactions experienced when I dance.

Expansion through space places me into different versions of my own body. New perspectives spiral around me with each inhalation. Every breath feels different, every inch of skin changes as it lilts over my bones, and every wooden floorboard cradles my feet as if we have never met before. The floor beneath me holds these exhilarations. It feels every step, every misstep. It watches me as I press, pull, push, and carve my way through space. My endurance through obsessive repetition creates fields of movement. The time spent in my fixated frenzy makes records of moments, recording the power I held over the space around me. I leave behind marks that reveal the body I once inhabited.

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Kelsey Murphy

Memento Mori’s direct definition is to remind oneself of death, and the inevitability of dying. Memento Mori is a culmination of both my fascination and studies of Victorian death culture and fashions. The Victorians used specific mementos in order to openly grieve and accept the death that surrounded them so frequently. The pieces in this show reflect multiple sides of the Victorian fascination spectrum, ranging from the abstract interpretations of death in Absorb and From the Corner of My Eye, to the more direct and representational forms in Inevitable. The Victorian era was a time of technological and spiritual experimentation, as they used these forms to explore the possibility of an afterlife, and to allow themselves to become immersed in the grieving process. By looking through a 19th century lens, I hope to place death in a spotlight that we do not typically see today, where the viewer hopefully becomes more aware of the fact that death surrounds them in multiple forms.

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Quianna Pabiana Ohren

This series, which I’ve titled “Girls,” explores themes of girlhood, sadness, anger, elation, love, and intimacy. I made this series to address my own gender identity and my strong emotions around womanhood. I feel like I want to embrace my girlhood while at the same time rejecting and acknowledging the traumas of my upbringing. I used cheap materials like crayons and kid’s markers for each piece, because I feel that I shouldn’t have to use any more than that to be taken seriously as an artist. Each piece explores a different emotion, or experience, that reflects womanhood. Girls provokes thoughts about the internal experience of being a girl as well as the external perception of girls and their love.

Ceph Poklemba

"Glitter-Glitz|Gore-Horror" is a series of paintings, and sculptures in response to queerness represented in horror media, specifically media influenced by the Hays Code. The Hays Code is the informal name of the Motion Picture Production Code. Two of the policies within the code directly targeted marginalized people: first, “Films could only present ‘correct’ standards of life,” and second, “Topics considered ‘perverse’ cannot be discussed or depicted.”

I record my personal reactions to these films, the queerness, the characters, and their stories, and how these extend into the “real” world (Dracula, The Silence of the Lambs, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, etc…). I take colors and themes within the movie, or that have importance to queer identity, and pull them into pieces, working paint into cloth or on large canvases, sewing, tearing, piercing them -- to convey and visibly record the emotions I go through working on these pieces leaving a mark, as they did. I am reclaiming the monstrous, queer visage painted into media and reality as my own. Rather than being a monster the coding focuses on simply villainizing an expressively queer character. This is what I am given by Hollywood as a queer person, where I am either the monster, the murderer, or the victim.

Kate Quamma

In the final stretch of undergrad, I have realized how forgiving painting can be. I reject any fear of mistakes or unsuccessful risks. Instead, they are welcomed as steps towards solving the puzzle of the painting. This mindset has revived and underscored the fun which drew me to making art in the first place. The three paintings were not preplanned. Rather, I followed my gut feelings and intuition. Things that I will always have, no matter what.

MaKenzie Reed

Memories shape our reality, and we often live our lives according to them even if they are inaccurate. Although these memories are warped by time and experience, they remain the foundation on which we are built. The importance of these memories become increasingly relevant as we move into adulthood, whether we are conscious of them or not. I attempt to examine personal memories for universally shared qualities of our human experience. In addition to this, the work explores why we hold on to some memories more than others, and how these memories shape our adult perspectives.

Brady Robison

I wanted to represent Corvallis through an unconventional perspective, some people thought it was odd that I wanted to center a project primarily on the suburban areas of Corvallis during the evening, since the project was focused at night and Corvallis’ common stereotype among OSU students is that many people like to engage in the city's nightlife, typically the youth. However projects like that have been traditional, even though many works related to youth and nightlife have been striking, candid, and relatable to many extents, I wanted to do something non-traditional.

I have lived in Corvallis for nearly four years and I have come to the realization that it feels like my home now. I have always enjoyed walking through different neighborhoods seeing small beautiful homes and feeling a sense of community.

In this body of work I wanted there to be a presence of intimacy and separation, leaving viewers feeling ambiguous and searching for a narrative while simultaneously feeling senses of familiarity. This body of work represents my appreciation for Corvallis and its strikingly simplistic beauty.

Weiming Shi

I moved to a small town in Oregon five years ago from a city of 300,000 people in China.

Everything was different: The food came in a package, the bus came along only every two hours, the streets were empty of people, and the buildings were short. It was like moving from a mental-forest to a real- forest. Everything was new to me, some things were comfortable, but other experiences were strange. I think everything has two sides and I want to show people different ways of looking at an object or an experience.

My purpose is to show culture shock humorously, because humor helps me understand and come to terms with cultural difference. In this project, I am comparing two different cultures based on my personal experience. Most images in this project include food because food is an important part of any culture.

Alliyah Turpen

Dissociation, a break in how your mind handles information. Feelings of disconnection from your thoughts, feelings, memories and surroundings. Warping your sense of identity and perception of time. Sometimes lasting for hours or weeks. Some days my reality is fragmented, watching myself from afar; others I feel like a ghost or vapor, barely there. Mirrors provide comfort and a sense of grounding when my world isn’t right. Now serving to show the shattered reality I live in.

Alexis Young

Wire horses Series:

My work has been an exploration of the relationship between horses and myself for some time now. Throughout my training, I have been conflicted with the way people justify their treatment of these animals. My work has explored my own experiences with people and horses as well as my own turmoil about competitive riding. Not only this, but in my art, I want to express the beauty of their form. Horses have unbelievable power and grace but to know a horse and be its partner, someone it trusts, is something completely unique and spiritual.

Siena Paintings Series:

These paintings came from my time in Siena, Italy and are representations of the horse ties or torch holders you can see around the historical city.

Laura Zion

These are selections from the body of work titled Memento, where I explore the beauty and stories of a lifetime in their physical remainders. “Windowsill Mementos" is a series of paper panels on which dead bugs, observed from life, are painted to-scale. These are inconsequential, tiny creatures with short life spans, but they hold an intricate beauty in the evidence that they like all living things experience life and death. The paintings are intended to be viewed through a magnifying glass, encouraging exploration and close observation. “A Picture’s Worth” is part of another larger series that looks at my own family’s history through the items we hold on to, in this case photographs. In the painting my mother and her family are sorting through the images. They are identifying the people, places, and stories tied to the the pictures, recording them on the backs and on sticky notes. I was inspired by the power these objects had to create an event of its own and, with this painting, another place to revisit a memory.