Art Event #1
SMP Presentation
On Tuesday May 4, 2010 I attended a series of Art & Art History Presentations at the Boyden Gallery in Monty Hall which covered several artists and their works over the course of their college career. Each artist started the presentation by explaining their initial interest in the art major and their personal definition of art. The graduates identified their experience in art just entering school here at St. Mary’s and then showed how their art progressed with the influence of the other artists that inspired them. They each had constructed a power point with images of their own work from high school on and also images from the artists that the graduates looked up to. To add to the project, each student had taken a corner of the gallery and created a culminating final art piece. The pieces seemed to be a representation of their definition of art at this point in their life.
One artist that I found particularly interesting was Stephanie Johnson, an art major who focused her efforts in digital photography, who also happened to be a student in one of my art classes. She defined art as something that is designed to create some kind of change of attitude, a sudden surprise that happens as a result of some visual stimuli. Her final project, Stenciled Remarks, dealt with human nature and relationships, specifically how the things that people say that hurt you or shock you, tend to stick with you and eventually become a part of you. She had taken pictures of subjects in the nude to make them seem vulnerable and then had stenciled remarks that people had said to the subjects over the course of their life that really hurt them. The comments were often sexually charged and related to body image. These comments shock viewer and create a sense of empathy for the person being portrayed. Overall, it was a really intimate project which struck me as being rather courageous. This artist obviously had dealt with harmful treatment by other people and she was tackling these issues head on and in the public eye. I also found her project to be very relevant to psychology because the way we think can be defined by social norms and people can experience unfortunate situations as a result of these social norms.