For most studio art majors, the comps process began almost a whole year ago as they started to think broadly about what themes they wanted to explore, mediums they wanted to use and inspirations they wanted to draw from at the end of their junior year. The Senior Art Show serves as the zenith of the senior studio art majors’ comps project and of their time at Carleton.
This year, seventeen seniors will have their works on display, and they represent a wide range of themes, inspirations and mediums. For most seniors, the Senior Art Show is the first opportunity they have to display their work in a formal museum setting.
Aside from the excitement that displaying their work in a public setting inherently brings, having the opportunity to display work in a gallery space allows for deeper engagement with the artists’ own work and the different ways to incorporate additional connotations.
For the show, Joella Lai ’23 made an installation titled “In Motion,” which features many parts that are primarily made of plaster and ceramics. She commented on the importance the gallery space provided her work: “In a small studio space in Boliou, I didn’t have the exact materials or space that I wanted. I tried many different arrangements, but it never felt officially done, living in a cluttered studio space. The Perlman museum and the staff were great at creating the exact environment I wanted for the piece … The installation plays a large part in what I’m trying to express with my work.”
Erin Timmins ’23 also commented on the significance of having the opportunity to display work at the Perlman: “It gave us the chance to think about how to display our work. It’s one thing to have it sitting on the table of a studio in Boliou, and completely another to have it hanging on a wall under a couple of spotlights.”
For Emily Luna ’23, the knowledge that her work would eventually end up in a public space played a role in how she approached her comps project, a mixed-media family portrait collage. She reflected, “Knowing it would be viewed by many and that eventually my family would get to see it forced me to be even more intentional in my choices and think about how these choices would reflect on my family.”
Of course, the senior artists drew ideas for their work from an abundance of other places, too.
Neda Tehrani ’23 has four oil paintings on display: “We may have crossed paths,” “Sunday,” “Coinslot” and “A birthday party in 2008.” Tehrani was initially interested in memory and the relationship between color and emotion; her comps project reflects this in her use of old home videos and photos from friends to inform her paintings and explore nostalgia. Commenting on how her project evolved from her original idea, Tehrani said: “The focus of my project shifted from simply showing memories to highlighting their unreliability.”
Arianna Lone ’23 worked with a plethora of mediums including car doors, a bicycle wheel, 3D printing pens, spray foam, bronze and silver. She left all her works untitled because she didn’t want to associate meanings with them. When beginning her works, she “started by thinking about the mediums that interested [her] most and looked to [her] culture for inspiration. [She] knew [she] wanted [her] work to be sculptural and contain elements of metalsmithing.”
Over the course of the ten weeks Lone was actually working on her pieces, her thought process underwent a major transformation. She said, “The end product was nothing like what I expected, but in the best way. It was very much outside of my comfort zone and the kind of art that I had previously been making, but now that it’s all done, I can confidently say I like the direction I went in and how it turned out.”
In addition to completing impressive, time- intensive pieces of art that incorporate four years of artistic practice, Lai and Tehrani discussed valuable lessons that they gleaned from the comps process.
Lai said, “Knowing that it’s okay to have work that isn’t fully developed and finished was reassuring. In a way, this project helped me understand that, as an artist, sometimes the work presented doesn’t have to be fully complete but rather a record of a much larger theme that you explore across multiple pieces you create throughout many years.”
Tahrani spoke about the pressure that she and other studio artist majors felt going into comps, believing that the Senior Show should represent the “best” work of their time at Carleton. “Fear of not living up to that expectation can make it difficult to start; there’s always this question of whether your work will be good enough. I’m not fully past that, but I did learn to experiment more through the comps process. I started paintings that I didn’t finish. I covered up sections of paintings that I didn’t like, and I completely redesigned compositions. I tried to be less attached to the results of my work and more focused on the process of making something.”
Many hours of thought and work were put into the works on display in the Senior Art Show by Luna, Tehrani, Timmins, Lone, Lai and all the other seniors.
The additional senior art majors include Caroline Jiménez Reyes, Eledon Beyene, Elise Hudson, Eve Gorman, Hannah Babcock, Isaiah Luke Vijil, Kyosuke Imai, Magdalena Worman, Robin Rojas-Cheatham, Sam Nelson and Tatiana Jiménez.
The Senior Art Show will be on display in the Braucher and Kaemmer Galleries of the Perlman Teaching Museum from May 12 – June 9, 2023.
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