Each spring, senior art majors exhibit their comps projects in Carleton’s Art Gallery and in Boliou. In doing so, they put their work and themselves on view in a way few other Carleton seniors are asked to do. We selected a sampling from the 16 projects exhibited this year.
[For a different, less visual look at more 2008 comps projects, see Thirteen Things We Learned from Comps This Year.]
Click the images in the story below to view larger versions of the artworks.
Alyssa Hursh
Hometown: Edina, Minnesota
Title: Family Tree, acrylic and water
Future: May move to Portland, Oregon, to work for a company that demolishes houses by hand in order to reuse the material
Tubular Sensation: “Every member of my family is represented by an acrylic tube. The sizes of the tubes represent the generations: The four biggest tubes are my grandparents, the next size are their children, and my generation is represented by small tubes. The colored water in the tubes represents the bond between parents and children. My mom’s dad is blue and her mom is red so all my mom’s siblings are various shades of purple, as they may be more like one parent than the other. My generation is represented by dense colors because we are still exploring the traits that we carry.”
Boris Scherbakov
Hometown: Monterey, California
Title: Three Studies of Nikolai, photograph
Future: Undecided, but will continue to explore photography as a hobby
Correct Address: “I’m originally from Russia and went back over winter break. I had this idea that every day I would ask a random person if I could take his or her portrait. I had asked an artist before Nikolai, using the impersonal way of addressing someone. He said, ‘Not if you talk to me that way.’ So I knew better when I asked Nikolai. He was happy to do it.”
Rafael Estrella
Hometown: Chicago
Title: Peras/Pears, mixed media
Future: Fifth-year intern for Carleton’s art and art history department and a student teacher in art at Northfield High School and Prairie Creek Community School; eventually attend graduate school to obtain a degree in architecture
Dream Weaver: “Immigration is something that I’ve lived through and it is a big part of my life. I wanted to show it through an insider’s perspective. I went back to Chicago, where I saw a neighborhood fruit truck driven by Mexican immigrants. The fruit truck represents the American dream to me—leaving behind family and friends in search of a better life. The little [details] in my tiles represent the injustices and struggles immigrants face once they get here. They offer contrast to the beauty of the fruit.”
Susan Badgwell
Hometown: Houston
Title: Landscape (detail), porcelain and stoneware
Future: “I am still figuring that out, but I know that I need to have art in my life.”
Animal Farm: Badgwell created tableaux populated by clay dinosaurs, dogs, cats, birds. “Trees show up in a lot of my work. I’ve loved them since I was a child. I also was obsessed with dinosaurs throughout my elementary school years. I would make up stories about my dinosaur figures, and they would interact with each other. That’s why the dinosaurs are there. My pet dachshunds inspired the dog figures, and the cats represent my roommate’s pets. I have my own idea of what’s going on in each scenario, but I expect viewers to come up with their own ideas.”
Vincent Chuan
Hometown: Singapore
Title: Marcel, photograph
Future: Fifth-year intern for Carleton’s psychology department, eventually attend graduate school to obtain a degree in psychology
Musical Drama: “Marcel is a friend of mine from home. He plays this Chinese bowed instrument called an erhu—a type of two-stringed violin. If you know how to play it, it makes a lovely noise. If you don’t, it sounds like a chicken dying. I wanted to do something related to my identity and to use lighting to create a dramatic effect. I didn’t want people to look at [my photographs] and frown and have to spend 20 minutes thinking about them. If you like the composition, it will make you smile and say, ‘That’s a pretty photo,’ and then move on without having to think too much.”
Em Harris
Hometown: Golden, Colorado
Title: Untitled, sculptural installation with video
Future: Undecided
Happy Days: “Art is so often about identity as related to oppression and not to privilege. I wondered what art that examines privilege—white privilege in particular—would look like. The setting [for the video] was a whitewashed, sterile, clean kitchen. I am dressed as a 1950s housewife in that space. It was red, white, and blue in a nonobvious way. [In the video, Harris is pushing vegetables through metal squares of various sizes into a soup pot.] Produce comes in all sizes, and it’s only interesting to watch it squish if it is a tight fit. The tomato was brilliant. I decided to use a progression of large to small vegetables. It’s open to interpretation—[perhaps] a narrowing or restriction of possibilities.”
Kelsey Marks
Hometown: Bird Island, Minnesota
Title: Straw Covers, silver, jewels, rubber chickens
Future: Graduate school at the Savannah College of Art and Design to obtain a degree in industrial design
Fun with Food: “I decided to make utensils for my comps project, but I wanted to make them fun and unique. The straw covers were inspired by a childhood fear that a bee would crawl into my can of soda and I’d swallow it and get stung in the throat. I bought the chickens at an art store in downtown Northfield. I can’t even tell you why I picked them up. I also made knife rests, corn pokes, and toothpick holders. The ideas came at random—for humor’s sake, mostly, just to enjoy eating.”
Nate Lindsay-Levine
Hometown: St. Paul
Title: Untitled, watercolor
Future: Summer internship in graphic design and then maybe graduate school for a degree in architecture
Community College: “I’m interested in the way everyone is connected on an intrinsic level. People connect on a social and physical level—talking or eating—but there’s also a level of connection in the private sphere when people engage in the same actions: sleeping, showering, creating art. They’re alone in those actions, but the fact that other people also perform them creates a sense of connection among a collective of individuals. I was torn on what to title [this series of watercolors]. I went with Untitled because I was purposefully trying to be vague in the descriptors both linguistically and aesthetically. I wanted to neutralize people’s individualness.”
Alex Chohlas-Wood
Hometown: Seattle
Title: A.D., slides projected onto clay slabs
Future: Continue making art, build a portfolio, and eventually attend graduate school for art
An Artist’s Eye: “With photography, I found that once my experiences were translated on paper there was no way to relate to them as an actual space. You could easily forget about the context of the place and just see the photographs as images or colors on a page. Slides create an environment. When you turn off the lights in a room and look at slides, you forget where you are and enter into the picture. You enter into a picture made of light, which is much closer to what a real place is like.
“I set up a site that highlights the contrast between the photograph, which is an ephemeral symbol for modern life in the sense that it’s made of light and is indefinable, and the clay, which represents fossils and the earth and things that have been established.”