“It provides an outlet where things, feelings and ideas can be worked out that can sometimes not be put into words,” Dodds said. “It gives me a connection with a part of myself that I feel I can sometimes not ?connect to.”
The Grunwald Gallery will welcome master’s student artists like Dodds to share that part of themselves today, with an opening ?reception at 7 p.m. Friday.
Dodds said she believes the lack of a guiding theme will allow for many different perspectives.
“I imagine there will be a myriad of different concepts featured, from the realistic to the abstract, two-dimensional, three-dimensional and functional,” Dodds said.
As for her own piece, Dodds said she will be presenting what she calls the “turning point” of her own work.
“Previously, I had only been working with paint in an observational manner,” Dodds said. “Time in the studio has forced me to work outside of the box, since what I wanted to paint — the natural world, landscape, etcetera — was no longer readily available to me. So I started collaging compositions that I wanted to paint.”
Dodds said the theme of her piece is a perceived ?detachment from nature.
“The overall concept is our disconnect with our surroundings, to each other and with the natural world because of technological advances and because of the speed with which everyone lives life,” Dodds said. The concept also reaches into how people fill their lives with things that mirror the natural world almost as if they are replacements for what their predominantly indoor lives are lacking, ?she said.
The process of creating this work, Dodds said, took about a month. Hours were spent on Photoshop and many ink cartridges were used. She said she thought about audience perception throughout the process.
“I wanted to make sure that the piece was very pattern-driven, suggesting the patterns that we decorate our houses in are almost substitutes for the outdoors,” Dodds said. “I didn’t want the figure to have an identity so that the viewer could almost superimpose an identity onto the image.”
Madeline Winter, first-year MFA candidate, said this piece was a departure from her typical style, though not in terms of ?material used.
“Prior to this series, I considered myself an exclusively representational painter, however, I have always wanted to make a foray into abstraction,” Winter said. “I’m really working on embracing the freedom that abstraction provides while still incorporating some representational elements into my compositions.”
Winter said she had two main sources of inspiration for this particular piece.
“First is the idea of vacations and how we spend a lot of time anticipating them, building them up and using them as an escape from our normal surroundings,” Winter said. “The second thing I am interested in is the ease of consumerism. The installation was created using beach items that I acquired very cheaply with one-click purchasing from Amazon.”
Winter said she is excited to have the opportunity to show at a gallery as prestigious and often-visited as the Grunwald.
“It’s a wonderful experience to be able to have my work in a venue that has had many incredible shows and the fact that it will have a lot of people passing through is fantastic,” Winter said.
MFA painter Lindsay Hall said she worked on multiple projects at once to create the piece she chose titled “The Invader.”
“I like to work on more than one piece at a time and I like to work across mediums, as well, because it stimulates my thinking and I’ve found that the projects inform one another,” Hall said. “I painted ‘The Invader’ while working on numerous other paintings, sculptures, silkscreens and drawings.”
Hall said she reintroduced herself to oil painting after taking a break to try exploring some other ?artistic styles.
“I decided to go back to oil for this painting and the others in this series because up to that moment I felt that I had flushed out the inks and I wanted to create a new challenge,” Hall said. “It feels great to be using it again and problem solving through it.”
As far as what she is most looking forward to, Hall said sharing this experience with her fellow MFA students is at the top of the list.
“I know that everyone in every department works very hard, and I’m sure that it will be an exciting and inspiring show,” Hall said. “In regards to my art, I’m looking forward to seeing it evolve and mature, and I’m excited to find out what directions it might take and the surprises that will ?happen along the way.”
