The Grunwald Gallery will open the first round of thesis exhibits with the work of six MFA and three BFA students ?today.
For her portion of the show, BFA Textile student Abigail Liechty assembled a group of sewn and stuffed textile forms with a social media twist.
“I’m creating sort of like a semi-portraiture setup where people will hopefully interact with and post on Instagram with the hashtag I’ve created,” ?Liechty said.
Liechty said she made 10 of these textile figurines for her thesis project by cutting and sewing pre-worked fabrics for the first time. Working in this fresh medium, she said, was an experience that helped her get in touch with her own personality.
“These guys have these awkward gestures that relate back to the body,” Liechty said. “That’s me trying to make a physical context of more awkwardness or how much I feel about being awkward in real life and everyday social situations.”
Life would be dreary without art, Liechty said, and the opportunity to express herself through her work at IU has helped her deal with life’s changes.
“Art is just, it’s more than just an expression of yourself,” Liechty said. “It’s a way to understand what you’re feeling because, at times, I’m working on a project, and it’s more than just completion. It’s understanding the emotion or things I was going through.”
Liz Scofield, an MFA student in the Digital Art program, also looked within herself for her latest project. The title of her exhibit is “Making Myself, Selling Myself, Playing With Myself” and is split into three parts: an action figure, a commercial and a short film.
Scofield said she started out by doing five full-body scans to create figurines of herself, then used those figurines to craft a commercial and film a melodrama, both of which will play on loop in the show. The theme is Scofield’s body as a commodity.
“I’ve been using my own identity and body and experience to sort of interrogate social systems and systems of power that reinforce, build constructions, punish deviances and sort of normalize identities and normalize behavior,” ?Scofield said.
Scofield said using her body as a commodity works to fight stereotypes, and she hopes to communicate how influential her identity has been in her artistic ?perspective.
“I’ve always been interested in identity and gender and queerness, using my own queer identity and trans identity as the material to ask these political and social questions to push back against the systems that punish against deviance,” Scofield said.
Some of the work focuses less on personal identification and more on revitalization of a landscape. Aric Verrastro, MFA Metalsmithing and Jewelry, looked into what he calls the “renaissance” of his home in ?Buffalo, N.Y.
Verrastro said when he went home last summer he realized some of the architectural staples of the town gained new purpose with the help of funding from the city. In order to commemorate this change, Verrastro said he refocused his artistic perspective.
“When I first came here, all my work was about gender equality and human rights,” Verrastro said. “It’s making work that was large-scale and that supported that idea and, again, soft, approachable forms, but now it’s shifted to this, because of seeing how Buffalo’s in its renaissance.”
Verrastro also changed up his material preferences for this body of work, transitioning from fabrics to metals and driftwood from Lake Erie. He added, however, that his work still maintains a softer quality.
“All the pieces have lots of colorful stitches on them, and it’s like me metaphorically stitching the past, present and future together,” Verrastro said. “Each piece becomes like a section of a quilt, and each section of the quilt is this specific story.”
More traditional works include the paintings of Benjamin Timpson, who returned for an MFA degree after 10 years away from the art scene.
Timpson’s work focuses on human nature as well as the constant struggle to strive for the best.
“We’re all human, we all make mistakes, we all make choices,” Timpson said. “Choices affect our life. There’s a duality in everybody, no one has the ?answer.”
Art is more than just what exists on the surface, Timpson said, but meaning must be made within the patron or artist themselves.
“I believe art should be aesthetically pleasing as well as content-driven,” Timpson said. “If they can take away ‘Wow, that’s a beautiful painting,’ that’s fine. If they want to be changed by it, only they can change ?themselves.”
