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The Lion's Roar

The Official Student News Media of Southeastern Louisiana University

The Lion's Roar

The Official Student News Media of Southeastern Louisiana University

The Lion's Roar

    11 artists, multiple media showcased

    Students interact with a mixed media art piece called “Swell” by Stoney Sasser.
    Sasser recently received her Master of Fine Arts from the Illinois State University
    in painting and sculpture. Sasser also had four videos in the exhibition as well.
    The Lion's Roar/Elizabeth Brown

    Recently, a selected group of graduates received their Master of Fine Arts degrees in various art forms and at various institutions that have the top graduate visual arts programs in the country. With this, the Contemporary Art Gallery, under the guidance of Dale Newkirk, Gallery Director of the Contemporary Art Gallery and Interim Department Head of the Department of Fine and Performing Arts, featured the artwork of these 11 selected artists in various forms of media including sculpture, video, photography, installation art and painting. 

    The gallery held its opening reception for the “Fresh: New Master Artists Part 1” exhibition on Thursday, October 15 as a part of this year’s Fanfare. These 11 featured artists include Naama Hadany, Patch Somerville, Matthew Yaeger, Rebecca Ott, Jessica Machacek, Zac Weinberg, Roberto Celis, Jeffrey Prokash, Jeffrey Stenborn, Stoney Sasser and Kyle Conor Nilan. The selected artists were picked by recommendation, according to Newkirk. 

    “Artists in the Fresh exhibition were recommended by graduate faculty members who teach at major Masters of Fine Arts programs across the country,” said Newkirk. “From the list of recommended artists, I picked the artists to be in the exhibition based on their artwork. Next year, Part II of the exhibition will show another selection of artists from other programs.”

    Roberto Celis, who received his MFA from the University of Texas at San Antonio and also gave an art talk last week during Homecoming Week, felt thrilled in response to being selected.

    “I felt super excited to be selected,” said Celis. “There’s this idea that you come out of grad school and you don’t know what’s going to happen and usually you kind of hit a bit of a wall because the last few years you’re in there every day and giving it your all, but you also kind of slow down a bit and get something to really look forward to, so that happened a few months after I graduated [with this show].” 

    In the featuring of his various sculptures for this show called “To Be a Missionary,” “To Be King of the Mountain,” “There Must Be a Mountain” and “My Name is Diego,” he explained what these pieces were and what they meant to him. 

    “These were all part of my thesis show so they were already made. I had been working on this body of work for about a year and a half and it has kind of evolved,” said Celis.

    Celis’ overall idea for these pieces was realizing the importance of others.

    “I have a second degree in psychology and if you look at a lot of my work, it deals with relationships,” said Celis. “You’ve heard the saying ‘two minds are better than one,’ but a lot of the studies out there say that we actually do better by ourselves, but I wanted to question it. I did more research and there’s a statistic that 96 percent of the school work you do is individual and four percent is group. We’re just kind of being taught to be individual and I don’t believe that to be innate. We’re meant to be with each other. It’s just how society works.”

    In response to the show, many of the attendees enjoyed the show and found it to be interesting. 

    The show captured the interest of many students of different majors.

    “As a non-artist, I definitely try to take the show for what it’s worth,” said management major Alexis Taylor. “I think that the pieces are really light-hearted this time. I’ve come to a lot of the shows in the past and it can be weird or kind of dark and scary and depressing, but this one the colors are light and kind of interesting. It seems like a pretty good show and it’s colorful.”

    The “Fresh: New Master Artists Part 1” exhibition will remain in the gallery until November 13, followed by Art and Design Senior Exhibitions on November 24.

     
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