Today from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. University of Oregon students and Eugene residents are invited to the opening of this week’s student exhibit of mixed media art, “Parts,” located in the LaVerne Krause Gallery on the first floor of Lawrence Hall.
When you walk into the gallery, the first thing you’ll see is graduate sculpture student John Paul Gardner’s mixed media piece “Emergence Theory.”
The piece is made up of intricate ink drawings and a paper cutout hanging sculpture meant to reveal the “eerie similarities” of the macro and micro worlds. For the piece, Gardner studied microscopic images and aerial views of crowd movement to create the sense of pattern and order evident in his 12-week-long black and white project.
There are a total of 18 drawings condensed together between four major areas of the wall. The blank void between each area is then filled with the hanging sculpture, which is placed at different depths of field to create a total three-dimensional experience.
Located on the left side of the gallery, sophomore art student Jessica Graff’s display includes ceramic and wire-based pieces that evoke different aspects of the human body.
“What I do is human-esque, but not human – a deconstruction of the human body,” Graff said about her work.
Her most distinctive piece, a circle of about ten ceramic hands surrounding a clay mask, is glazed and fired in a western-style Raku fashion.
This process requires the artist to put their pieces beneath a garbage can containing a fire and a pile of sawdust so that everything goes up in flames. The addition of smoke and fire creates a unique dark finish on the unglazed portion of the clay complementing the shiny metallic blend of purples, coppers, blues and reds.
With his “dirty” art, graduate printmaking student Oran Miller is “having fun starting out with a mess and making something fine out of it.”
His eight mixed media drawings located on the right side of the gallery started out on brown butcher paper and depict various representations of wildlife that he has created in commemoration of deceased family members and his mother among others.
Miller, the son of a taxidermist, is attempting to bring the same principles of taxidermy, the act of bringing a dead animal “back to life,” to his works. He does this by showing in detail different parts of animals, such as steelhead fish heads and the wing of a sapsucker.
For his art, Miller was “scrounging for anything that would make a dark mark” and came up with mud, dirt and a charcoal and water “soup” as his unconventional components that would complement the standard pastels and tempera paint.
The “Parts” exhibit runs through April 11.
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