Rex Fish, battalion expert and former fire marshal, demonstrates the steps of how to correctly use a fire extinguisher at the fire prevention workshop Monday in Webb Hall. Many students arrived welcoming the three men from Emporia’s fire department who had put together the presentation in hopes to better educate students on ways to prevent fires in the home. Jenny Pendarvis/The Bulletin

Four years worth of artwork lined the Bruder Lobby in King Hall last week as Marco Hernandez, senior printmaking and painting major, hosted his senior art show.

The art was up for almost two weeks before the reception last Friday evening during which about 100 people attended. Most of the artwork displayed, Hernandez said, he had drawn for class assignments.
“I guess I just want people to look at my artwork,” Hernandez said. “Not many people have seen my artwork. They know that I draw and stuff, but not many have seen my actual artwork.”
Hernandez’s family helped set up a table with food and drinks during the reception. Some teachers offered extra credit in their classes for attending.
“I liked a lot of his work,” said Kristy Farnsworth, freshman elementary education major. “Most of his paintings are dark which isn’t really my style, but they are really good.”
Hernandez said his idol in the art world is Francisco Goya, a Spanish printmaker and painter who worked in the late 18th to early 19th centuries.
“His images and his approach to print making are outstanding,” said Dan Kichefer, professor of art, life drawing and printmaking and advisor to Hernandez. “His work is very descriptive. You will often find a self portrait in them. He did a series of etchings that dealt with confrontation that I really like. They show inner conflict.”
Art shows are required for graduation for seniors with an art degree. Most students only display their works for a week before the reception, but Hernandez was allowed more time to display because his was the first of the new semester and was the only one ready.
“They are responsible for hanging the show,” Kichefer said. “Their advisor might help them in regard to what number of pieces to put in or what might be put in or taken out. After that the student does the majority if not all of the work. It is very similar to something you would see at a major gallery in Kansas City or even New York.”
In preparation for the event, Hernandez said he made invitations and started a group on Facebook. The paintings had price tags ranging from $50 to $200. Hernandez’s personal favorite, “Versus Demon,” is an etching and watercolor piece, priced at $200.
“There are a lot of self portraits,” Hernandez said. “It is more personal, it is artwork that shows my emotions. If I were to sell them I would be a little sad. I just want to show them off to people, maybe put them around my house.”
After graduations Hernandez said he would like to get his masters in print making.

Rocky Robinson

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Alum Kayla Erickson, Mike Tuttle and Emporia resident Taumi Feil look at the detailed work on a sculpture by Grant Charpentier during the opening of his senior show, “Under My Skin,” Friday night in the Gilson Gallery in King Hall. The show will be on display until Jan. 27. Kellen Jenkins/ The Bulletin

The hairy, spiny forms that make up Grant Charpentier’s senior show “Under My Skin” are what he calls “scary, but original.” The Gilson Gallery in King Hall will be full of these animal-inspired figures until Jan. 27.

“This is something that I’ve never seen before, something I can call my own,” said Charpentier, senior glass forming major. “I was thinking about doing a sea theme but there are hundreds of artists out there who can do a sea theme and do it two times better than I could. This is something I’m willing to bet isn’t out there.”

Charpentier took inspiration from animal forms.

“I first came across this form looking at different skeletal forms in various reptiles,” he said. “I wanted to use glass in a minimalist way to embrace the form instead of dominating it.”

While some of the pieces are hard and uninviting, they didn’t start out that way.

“They started off pretty fluffy and nice,” Charpentier said. “Centipedeish – and then as time went on, the process got really monotonous and my emotions began to come out, even though they may have been negative. They started becoming more aggressive and agitated so my emotions started to transcribe through the work.”

Many people attended the opening of “Under My Skin” last Friday, including Charpentier’s girlfriend’s parents, who drove 7 hours to be there.

“Grant is like a sponge,” said Tracy Webber, Newman, Colo., resident and mother of Charpentier’s girlfriend. “He collects everything and sees everything from different sides.”

Charpentier wanted the viewers of his show to feel some of the angry emotions he put into each piece.

“I wanted to create a push/pull relationship with the viewer,” he said. “I wanted the viewer to be interested in them but at the same time be pushed away because they’re dangerous.”

And they really are dangerous. The spines sticking out of the pieces are chunks of pointed glass that Charpentier referred to as “teeth” and bent pieces of thick metal.

“What I like about the art is how alive they look and ferocious in manner,” said Collin Haire, junior art major. “They just pop out at you. They’re almost moving.”

Haire understood the message Charpentier was trying to get across.

“In his artist statement, he mentioned that he used the skeletal structure of snakes,” Haire said. “I definitely see that. They are like mutant centipedes.”

Charpentier did not want to just show glass pieces.

“I feel different about them all,” Charpentier said when trying to describe his favorite. “I’m a glass major but I wanted to do something different. I wanted to stray away from just showing glass and showing other types of medias.”

For Charpentier, the work of putting together one piece was painstaking and took several hours.

“I don’t consider myself and OCD artist,” he said. “But this is really repetitious with little variation.”

The use of metal in his pieces is what Charpentier thought was original about them.

“Obviously there is a lot of metal work in here,” Charpentier said. “What I like about metal work is that it goes hand in hand with glass. It’s hard work. It’s about problem solving. Things don’t always work out like you want to but you work through it and you come  out on top sometimes and sometimes you don’t.”

Even after spending a lot of time working on the pieces, Charpentier was not sure what to call his collection.

“I was telling my friend about how these were driving me nuts and she said why don’t you just name it under your skin,” Charpentier said.

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Phillip Ro’lon Miller, senior graphic design major, puts the finishing touches on his work for the Graphic Design Senior Show Wednesday in King Hall. Miller is one of six seniors who will exhibit their work May 8-12 in the Eppink and Gilson Galleries in King Hall.

The Graphic Design Senior Show, on display from 5-7 p.m. May 8-12 in King Hall, will display a combination of textual, packaging and other types of design art from ESU.

The show, which is free to the public, is meant to be a chance for senior graphic design majors to showcase the fruits of their ESU education and to provide the rest of the campus with a taste of modern graphic design.

Senior graphic design majors Corey Adkins, Eric Sonnakolb, Krista Schraer, Landon Merrill, Phillip Miller and Zach Janice are the featured artists of the show and will display art ranging from border and poster designs to text manipulation, 3-D design and Photoshop-inspired themes.

“This will not be your typical art show by any means,” Janice said. “Pretty much all of it will be digital artwork and that will range from computer design tools like Photoshop and such to displays of borders, posters, even business card designs.”

The seniors began work on the show at the beginning of the semester, but really began to concentrate on piece arrangements and display setup during the last two semesters, Janice said.

Each artist will have several displays or individual art pieces up for display, Janice said and while some of the displays will be themed, many will be abstract.

“We’ll have some displays that have digital themes, or a virtual motif, but a lot of what we’re doing can’t really be defined by a set art theme,” Janice said. “In a way that’s the point, we’re trying to break free of your standard themes with the variety in our pieces.”

In addition to creating pieces solely to be displayed in the show, Janice has also worked on a magazine promoting the arts and music in Emporia, as well as what he termed a “branding project.”

“For a branding project, we’ll go in and take over a business graphically,” Janice said. “And we’ll redesign everything from the ground up: displays, advertisements and business cards, you name it.”

A graphic design show does not imply that the art exhibits will be completely devoid of more traditional art styles, Schraer said, but rather that the styles will be incorporated into each design artist’s own vision and thematic interpretation.

“Someone coming to this show can expect to see both fine arts and graphic design styles blended together,” Schraer said. “The entire presentation will be set up like a fine art gallery, with each of our pieces arranged with each other, so no one artist has their own little section.”

Schraer, whose graphic design interests lean toward typography (graphic manipulation of text) and packaging designs, also said that this final exhibition at ESU is not without a bittersweet feeling.

“It’s sad that this is the last show we’re doing as ESU graphic design majors,” Schraer said, “but there’s also that great feeling of knowing you’re done.”

While most of the graduating seniors will go on to work or graduate school, Miller said his love for design and art will keep him at ESU for a little longer.

“My area of interest in graphic design is more toward Photoshop and posterized designs,” Miller said. “So I decided to continue at ESU with the photography program and earn a major in that as well.”

This year’s Senior Show format has been set up in a different style from years past, a decision made by the current graphic design seniors, Miller said.

“This year we’re doing something unique that we haven’t done before to my knowledge,” Miller said. “Usually it’s set up more like a traditional art gallery, with each artist having their own section, but this year we had a hand in actually setting up the displays for our displays, and we put our touch into that.”

Zachary Hughes/The Bulletin

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What do a woman sawing off the legs of a chair she is sitting in and a pig standing on a bed have in common?

Both are pieces of art from two Kansas University graduate art students, Minerva Ortiz and Jody Wood, who visited Emporia State’s Art Forum yesterday to speak to a crowd that nearly filled Science Hall 72.

“It’s really great to see people coming out of a program that we could very easily be going into,” said Winston Walker, senior art major. “I think it was interesting that they were both dealing with things that were very close to them. … They were both dealing with stuff that was not foreign to them so it was very real and had a lot to do with things that happen to them every day or they would think about every day.”

Ortiz is a painter who works with oil paints and Wood is a performance artist. Ortiz received her bachelor’s degree from the University of California Santa Cruz.

“I had a lot of questions and (art) allowed me to make these questions tangible,” Ortiz said. “I could make something that I can show for these abstract thoughts that I had or was considering. It didn’t have to be so absolute. … It’s strange, because it’s not like, ‘oh, I have this answer in my head,’ it’s like a feeling.”

Wood attended Seattle Pacific University, where she graduated with a degree in English. She says that her style of performance art is to take the art out of the gallery and into the public’s eye.

“The performance art I’m really interested in right now always requires some kind of interaction with the public and that really sustains me because it puts my art into a real world context,” Wood said. “The idea is to develop by just interacting with other people, bouncing ideas off of them and seeing how they are reacting to the situation. It’s very sustaining to constantly be in contact with other people. It’s challenging, but it’s sustaining.”

Ortiz said she first started with family portraits, trying to honor both the flaws and the virtues of her subjects. An example is a painting of her grandmother who she described as kind, but also controlling. In the painting, her grandmother looks out at the viewer while a German Shepherd dog is standing next to her. She holds the dog’s head dominantly and tightly to her body while clutching its red collar.

“In a sense of it, (paint) lets you create anything,” Ortiz said. “It’s like the universal matter. It’s so pliable and you can create anything. I could paint an instrument, people. It’s like substance, raw creation.”

An example of Wood’s work was a booth in a gallery where visitors put on headphones and listened to interviews with various women about what makes them feel comfortable while, at the same time, watching a video of Wood physically fighting other women in a public setting.

“Usually, it stems from something that’s difficult for me reconcile,” Wood said. “Making art about it allows me to search for answers and experiment. Usually, in my work, I can break social rules I wouldn’t normally be able to break living daily life.”

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