Fine Art Senior Exhibition

So the senior exhibition is a really important stage. It shows the culmination of a lot of work that the students have been building over the course of years. Through their junior year and their senior year, they start to think about how they're going to bring this together and really use that core series of skills to express themselves, to figure out what it is that they want to say. The senior show is supposed to embody everything that you've learned here and kind of all the lessons that you now have inside of you to make the work. People working in the studio downtown really put in a lot of hours down there, really tried to push their work really a lot further than what they had been doing, and I think for a lot of people it really shows. That's one of the strengths of our program is how very much we practice. Everyone wanted to go farther than what they could possibly do before, push boundaries and see where they can end up and try their best. I feel relieved and really honored to work with all these people and to even finish a body of work like this really showed me that I actually am an artist. You've got to build the skill set and there's no substitute for sheer time. Talent has a little bit to do with it, but most of it is just repetitive practice, and so the students are impressive because they're willing to put in that kind of practice, but they're also impressive because they have mined deeply into themselves to look for great ideas. If you want to break rules, you should really understand those rules. I had to make sure I understood and could do this correctly in order to make it intentionally. To make my work, I always have to put myself into it. I can't just build things. I have to have a reason for why I did it. It makes me feel happy that I can capture these people, their essence, and then capture them in their environment and how they interact, and this body of work does that. I've taken a lot of different elements from different years and different mediums that I've worked with and kind of had them all come together in one final complete body of work. You must log the hours to get to that point, and the students in the exhibition that we're showing right now have done that. I've seen them do that. I was there at almost every one of these stages, and they have logged the hours, and that's why the stuff is so good.