Advanced Studio Art Exhibition 2024

24 x 36", 11 x 17", 8.5 x 11", 1920 x 1080 px, 1080 x 1080 px

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Seattle University's 2024 winter quarter advanced studio art class required a poster to be made to highlight the exhibition event as part of the final of the course. I was a part of this class which helped me in my design process for this class too. The advanced studio art classes were all about students creating their own artwork to the best of their ability and then having them showcased in the Vachon Gallery in the Seattle University Fine Arts building. It was a very lecture heavy class with our professor who spent 6 hours a week lecturing us students about different artists. What I learned from those lectures were the different design and artistic decisions every artist made when creating their own work. Unlike the other design projects for my design work scholarship from 2023-24, this project was different because I was in the class the poster was being made for. Being a part of the class helped in my design process a bit because it allowed me to understand what kind of design to make that would represent our class of artists collectively.

 

During one lecture, I distinctly recall our professor talking about American artist John Baldessari's, Specimen (After Dürer), 2000. This was one of my main sparks of inspiration into the poster design through the concepts from Specimen I connected with the most and to our class of artists. When coming up with a central design that would represent our entire class of 15 artists, I struggled to come up with a concept that would encapsulate how we all felt as a group. So, my initial design drafts started from a simplified and clean version of Swiss style. I had used all of the names of artists and simple lines to create the number 15, as that was how many artists were in our class. I didn't like the design after sitting with it for a while and after showing it to the class. The simplicity of Swiss style did not fit in with the artistic and crazily creative feeling I had when analyzing the entire

class's artwork.

 

As I went back to the drawing board to restart my design drafts, I was inspired to create something that was much more visually striking, confusing, and chaotic. So, I had created a couple different versions of drafts that included two of a tiger as the main element and one of a ladybug. The tiger idea came on a whim to use, and I used it to create a grungy poster and one that looked more chaotic and confusing with a matrix-like design. I had much more connection to the ladybug design and soon found out that the class felt the same way. The idea with the ladybug overprint effect with a pin going through it was to create a visually appealing, striking, and intriguing image while also not being overly complicated like the tiger designs. The overprint effect I used was to create an artistic feeling combined with a bold coloration to make it visually striking from far away and to help it stand out from other designs around it. I photoshopped a pin into the center of the ladybug to create a similar appearance to John Baldessari's, Specimen. The pinned bug idea really resonated with our class like I had hoped it would. The pinned bug idea was that, similar to Baldessari's Specimen, our work would all be pinned up like a bug at a museum for anyone to examine and analyze. When bugs are pinned up and put on display in a museum, they lose their dynamic qualities and become frozen in time. Like pinned bugs, the artwork that was on display was vibrant and dynamic all in their creation, but then become stagnant, pinned to blank walls to be analyzed by

an audience.

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My artwork that I had entered into the exhibition in short was themed around the emotional response to different animals and how we view them. Rats are animals typically viewed as creatures of the night and seen with disgust, horror, and fear. On the other hand, while animals don't have any real superpowers, Vixen from DC utilizes the power of animals and thus becomes a superhero. Having animalistic abilities that are superhuman can feel like it shouldn't actually be a superpower realistically, but nevertheless animals can create a sense of power within us. The tentacle represents something alien that we recognize with some animals. Cats and dogs people tend to love the most and have even humanized them to an extent, but creatures like squids or other deep-sea creatures represent something alien, unknown and unrecognizable at times. Lastly, animals like the black panther/jaguar represent a sense of beauty and awe we attribute to wild animals. There's something about animals that creates a sense of admiration/appreciation for the world around us and how beautiful it can all be.