“Silent Scream” – Eun-Kyung Suh

 Silent Scream
Silk organza, printed text, cotton thread
Dimension variable
Seven comfort women survivors’ testimonies were projected on the inner faces of silk organza. Each arch, consisting of truncated pyramid forms, witnesses each survivor’s painful and unbearable memory of the abuse they suffered as sex slaves during WWII.
 
 
 

We, Survivors

Silk organza, printed images
I investigated extreme Diaspora experience of Korean Comfort Women. During World War II, 200,000 young women were recruited and forced into sexual slavery in Japan’s military brothels in Asia. The abuse of comfort women has proved a painful and unbearable memory. It was 1990 when the first South Korean women lifted the veil of shame and requested a formal apology and compensation for the thousands of women affected by the Japanese government. Today only over 50 of the 239 women who publicly acknowledged their experiences are alive in Korea. The portraits of the 50 survivors and their testimonies are incorporated into silk organza boxes to express symbolic sympathy for their suffering. The portraits of the Comfort Women survivors (military sexual slavery by Japan) provided by the Korean Council for Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan.
 

Junior Art Majors

 

Participants:  Michaul Williams, Julian Smith, C. Sofia Naab, Hannah Kerkering, Eliana Actor-Engel

Michaul Williams – photography

Hannah Kerkering – photography

Julian Smith – ceramics

C. Sofia Naab – mosaics and photography

Eliana Actor-Engel – ceramics

Senior Art Thesis Exhibition

 

The senior art majors spent the past four years honing their artistic skills and finding ways to use their art to express their ideas formally to the world.  This exhibition is a culmination of their hard work, soul-searching, and artistic development during their time at Saint Joseph’s University.
Jesse Buxton, Krista Jaworski, Katherine Lord and Colin Mallee are exhibiting work that is varied not only in medium, but also in style and ideology.  These young artists deftly meld influences from personal struggles, life experiences, artistic research, and the work of a wide range of ancient to contemporary artists.

K A T H E R I N E     L O R D
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My work is a reflection of myself and experiences I have had throughout life. I take materials I find to be satisfying and work with them to create pieces. I enjoy the process of taking something that is “nothing” and making it in to something.  Typically I reflect on whatever thought has caught my attention, and transfer the thought to expression. This causes my work to be mostly abstract with a common theme of figurative undertones. The process of reflection and then translation in to creating is a very therapeutic process for me. In a way, you could say art is my own personal therapy. I take what I see, experience, and hear about and process it through creating and making work.

Common subjects of my work are things that have impacted my life severely, good and bad. I find strength in my family, and although a large portion of my work reflects traumatic experiences I have had in my life, there is always an undertone of strength. That strength being to overcome tragedy and find beauty in it. I find beauty in pain. There is a distinct moment when a person chooses how they will be effected by something that has hurt them. That moment is when one chooses to accept what had happened and how it will impact their lives. I have chosen to find beauty in pain in everything I have ever experienced. This could be from a lack of choice. You have to deal with what you are handed, and this must be how I do that. I try to share this beauty with others around me so they can find strength and solace in it as well. As people, we are comforted by another understanding us, it is in a moment of relation that we are able to feel cared for and find strength. I want to share my strength and experience with as many people as possible and I do that in my work. That doesn’t mean I think my work will have that effect on everyone. I am successful if I am able to effect one person in a positive way. To make one person feel that they are not alone in their pain. My art is the way I choose to do this, and is the way I am capable of doing this.

J E S S E     B U X T O N
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My strong interest in history informs my work in ceramics. The shards left behind act as physical evidence of ancient cultures.  From pots left behind, we can learn how people used them for utilitarian purposes and also track aesthetic trends. I am interested in integrating features from historical vessels into a more contemporary context. My work is an expression of my experiences and taps into the material culture that has been created by those before me.

My contemporary influences include Carl Cunningham-Cole, Svend Bayer, and Ben Carter in his podcast Tales of a Red Clay Rambler, which introduced me to the close-knit clay community. As far as material culture from the antiquity, Greek and Roman pots have particularly held my interest.  These pots have also impacted the forms that I create to a great extent.  Specifically, the ancient Pithos, or storage jars associated with Greece from the Bronze and Iron ages that held food and store liquids are an exceptional display of technical achievement and necessary function.  These massive forms make the audience wonder what is contained within and marvel at the sheer volume of the jars.

My process for making includes creating composite vessels, or vessels made up of many building blocks.  This is done by using the wheel as a tool to create inventive features for traditional parts of a vessel.  I am also experimenting with the Onggi method of throwing coils, allowing me to make larger work and presenting an intense technical challenge. These methods allow one to play with proportions and experiment with ancient Greek proportionate ideals.  I aim to bring my own creative take on traditional notions of beauty and proportions. I strive to master the technical ability and blend historical references with my own artistic voice.

C O L I N    M A L L E E
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I found out I was good at art in my freshman year of high school. At the time I was very religious and I remember recalling a bible passage that went something along the lines of, “Whatever you are, strive to be the best at it.” Nowadays, I look at my art from a slightly different kind of view. Striving to be the best I can be, my work is now more personal. By that, I mean to say, my art is an inside joke with myself.

I like comic books both of the western and eastern variety. Much of the inspiration for my work and style comes from things like cartoons and anime.  Stories of heroes drawn with thick outlines that seem to pop right off the page have always interested me. When making my art I like to incorporate many of the techniques involved in making comics and graphic novels such as line weight variation, strong, confident mark making, and dynamic angles.

Comic book artists and graphic novelists like Jim Lee, Alan Moore, and Frank Miller are some of my biggest inspirations.  I admire their unique takes on the use of line and line weight variation as well as their employment of various shading techniques.  I’ve also drawn some inspiration from more traditional artists like Roy Lichtenstein and Kehinde Wiley.  Their particular use of vivid colors and attention to the human figure is what inspires me most about their work. The inspiration to add three dimensional elements to some of my pieces came both from a curiosity in expanding on what I could do on a canvas as well as a desire to blend my love for painting and drawing.

I’m not a political person and neither is my work. I make what I know and what I know best is what makes me happy. As an actor, especially in an ensemble performance, the most important rule is if you don’t look like you are enjoying yourself the audience won’t either. In this way, I hope my work shows how much care and delight goes into each piece. I’ll keep the punch line of my inside joke between me and my art, but I hope those who view my art will still smile along with us.

K R I S T A    J A W O R S K I
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Social media is admittedly a very large part of our lives. Our virtual worlds and reality are one and the same, yet the way people behave online and in real life are very different. I am fascinated by the way people have developed their lives alongside social media, and what it means in our society today. In everyone’s bubble of virtual media people are obsessed with creating a better image of themselves online and gaining arbitrary instant gratification. We’re often bombarded with this media, and sometimes peek into the real lives’ excessive thoughts and anxiety behind posting these forgetful images. It doesn’t matter.

In this show, I aim to bring these ideas to life with multiplicity of the most recognizable image: our own faces and digital icons. I’ve personified characteristics of social media and those who use it in my imagery.

I’ve mainly used a combination of acrylic paint, paint markers, and acetate layering. I wanted to replicate the feeling of my sharpie sketches, and transfer it to a different medium, so using the paint makers on canvas accomplished that.

Student Art Exhibit – Chromatic Entropy

 The Boland Hall Gallery provides a space that helps to educate and serve the SJU and surrounding communities.  Student work is rotated on a monthly basis and March features ceramic work from Senior Art Major, Sue Henry.

Sue Henry’s Chromatic Entropy

 by Molly Ledbetter, Gallery Exhibition Research Assistant

In this powerful, vibrant body of work, artist Sue Henry explores such themes as nature, the organic, deterioration, and femininity.  The title of her show, “Chromatic Entropy,” suggests a sense of beautiful degradation, a concept much of her work embodies.  In many ways, her collection enshrines and celebrates the natural processes of aging and wear in life, capturing simultaneously the stunning intricacies that accompany such change.   Her show exhibits decay and aging in the natural world, and from this emerges realized notions of maturity, growth, rootedness, and strength.

Art has always been an important part of Henry’s life, though it took a back seat when she started a family and pursued a career in another field.  When her children got a little older, she reconnected with clay through local art classes and studios.  Years later, however, she developed a painful case of arthritis and had to take a break.  It wasn’t until her second year at Saint Joe’s that she rekindled the flame and found herself back at the wheel, where she took her work in an entirely different direction from her functional ware—dishes, bowls, mugs, plates—of the past.  In an interview, she expressed some personal parallels to her work:

…there is a connection for me to this feeling of entropy.  As a woman, the older I get, the bolder I get.  Around age 50, I realized that I cared less about what others thought, but in a good way.  I just turned 60 and know I have a voice, have opinions that I share sparingly, and am so much more embracing of differences in people.

In a word, she speaks to the positivity and wisdom that comes with maturing—a message most manifest in her work.

With the titles complementing each piece, Henry “wanted to give the viewer something to consider,” as you browse and lean in to the work to discover discrete elements and texture.  In the sea of this nature-inspired collection hide little gems and secrets and morsels of detail folded into the shadows.  Engulfed in blankets of undulating petals and shells emerge succulent, embossed, shiny little pods and pearls and seeds.  These components, hiding in crevices and nestled into small nooks in the sculpture almost breathe life into each piece.   The attention to minutiae and liberties with color help the work come to life in a very organic, elegant, and dynamic way.

            

“Drawing and Narrative” Christopher Troutman – drawing

February 20 – March 24, 2017

“Drawing and Narrative”
by Christopher Troutman

Limited hours Spring Break March 13 – 17

Artist Statement
Drawing has dominated my studio research for the past 8 years.  The immediacy of drawing materials, charcoal and ink, allows me to achieve a close connection between thought and mark, because, for me, drawing is an exercise in visual memory.  While drawing from imagination I recombine and exaggerate aspects of remembered subjects while avoiding external references until my ability to visualize falls short, at which point I resort to observational sketches and photographs to clarify forms.  The subjects I draw are human figures in contemporary urban settings, based on my experiences and observations living primarily in the United States’ Midwest, southern Japan, and recently southeast Texas. I depict multiple figures, suggesting that they could interact, implying narrative and the passage of time, which is enhanced by dividing drawings into multiple sections.  Recently, I have used multi-sectioned drawings to examine similarities and differences between my memories of the U.S. and Japan by juxtaposing visual and spatial features unique to both locations. I amplify my subjects through mark making, intensified value patterns, dynamic compositions, and unexpected points of view in order to reveal the value of daily visual experiences as a topic of exploration in drawing.
~ Christopher Troutman

“Identity” Paintings by Art Minor

Emily Hopkins, ’17
Emily Hopkins is a senior at Saint Joseph’s University majoring in Psychology and minoring in Art.
With bold and vibrant color, the work of Emily Hopkins is exceptionally personal – a sort of doorway granting viewers permission to experience a sense of peace that Hopkins herself experiences while undergoing the process of creating a piece. Creating with raw emotion, Hopkins paints with unrestricted expression through the use of color. Her manipulation of color exudes different emotions that Hopkins hopes her audience can experience as well. Hopkins’s work is a genuine expression of her own thoughts and feelings, raw and unrestricted. The subject matter of particular pieces are realistic and comprehensible in form but portrayed with passionate and suggestive color affinitive with Hopkins’s own choice. The work of Emily Hopkins is organic, naturalistic, saturated with color, and most importantly, an innate representation of the artist herself.

“Misplaced” Installation of mixed media by Eun Kyung Suh

June 5 – August 4, 2017

“Misplaced”
Installation of mixed media by Eun Kyung Suh

Silent Scream (2015)
Silk organza, printed text, cotton thread
Dimension variable

Description: Seven comfort women survivors’ testimonies were projected on the inner faces of silk organza. Each arch, consisting of truncated pyramid forms, witnesses each survivor’s painful and unbearable memory of the abuse they suffered.

“We, Survivors”
Silk organza, printed images, cotton thread
Dimension variable

I investigated extreme Diaspora experience of Korean Comfort Women. During World War II, 200,000 young women were recruited and forced into sexual slavery in Japan’s military brothels in Asia. The abuse of comfort women has proved a painful and unbearable memory. It was 1990 when the first South Korean women lifted the veil of shame and requested a formal apology and compensation for the thousands of women affected by the Japanese government. Today only over 50 of the 239 women who publicly acknowledged their experiences are alive in Korea. The portraits of the 50 survivors and their testimonies are incorporated into silk organza boxes to express symbolic sympathy for their suffering. The portraits of the Comfort Women survivors (military sexual slavery by Japan) provided by the Korean Council for Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan.