The “Faculty Exhibition” is in the Schoenherr Gallery at the Fine Arts Center until May 29, and is showing off the recent works of eleven art faculty members. The exhibit shows off artwork that includes paintings, ceramics, graphic design, mixed media and more.
One of the faculty members showing pieces in the show is Kevin Valentine, adjunct assistant professor of art, who started his journey to his art career when he started drawing at about age 11, “I always loved art and so I started drawing when I was like 11 or 12. I started drawing, painting. I did 20 years of etching and painting and mixed media stuff and then I started doing more media, song writing and video and then I went back to grad school and added performance pieces and other mixed media, not mixed media like on board, you know like totally mixed interactive installations and stuff.”
Valentine provided some interdisciplinary pieces for the show. “One piece is a 25th anniversary of a work, or series of series actually, on the Gulf War. So, when the first Gulf War occurred in ’91 the coverage was all antiseptic, it was all little green dots blowing up little things on a screen and they were like “yes, we hit our target, we’re so good” and you never saw any destruction or hurt people or anything.”
“I thought that was a terrible trend to have a hundred thousand people die and you didn’t see a single one of them so I did some etchings about that which were misunderstood, largely, so I did a whole song cycle and then I’ve done other work off and on since,” said Valentine.
In 2008 Valentine began drawing lines in chalk and lines in the sand, which he said was meant, to represent the widows in Iraq. “On International Women’s Day that year, the Iraqi Women’s Affairs Minister quit because her budget was cut to $18,000 for the whole year for the whole nation. So one of the things I’ve done is draw lines in the sand all over 40 beaches and around the country and once in England,” said Valentine.
These lines in the sand eventually turned into a memorial sandbox of black sand, which will be the final piece in the 25th anniversary series.
Valentine’s other work draws inspiration from a different world crisis.
“Then the other two were inspired by the refugee crisis, there is a music video with an original song and some water colors in it and there is another piece where you float a little boat from the shore of Turkey to Lesbos and see if it is going to sink depending on how many magnets, representing refugees, you put on the boat. The more you put on, the more you get across but the easier it is to sink” said Valentine.
Another professor in the show is adjunct assistant professor of art Kate Pszotka who started painting at a very young age, “The long story that everyone starts with is that I used to draw when I was five. I started oil painting lessons when I was four because I bugged the crap out of my parents and they finally gave in. So I oil painted until I was 13ish, then I tried sports, which did not work out for me, I broke every bone I could. Then I came back to art later in high school and I have a bachelors in studio art and a masters in studio art with a specialty in ceramics and I’ve just been making it along the way.”
Pszotka put some mixed media and ceramics pieces into the show. “Over the last five to ten years has been much more abstract. I used to cast specific objects and make many of them. So two big things have changed, lack of color has always been there but I’ve kind of thrown the object out the window essentially and just gone with shapes and textures.”
“They are all kind of based off of, the formal qualities are the ways that the materials work, permanence and impermanence so there’s biodegradable body hair or animal fur as well as found objects but these pieces specifically, most of my work ends up coming from just like ruminating on relationships between people and thoughts about memory. So a lot of it comes out of reminiscing or memory from whatever angle, whether it is a specific moment in time or the idea of something” said Pszotka.
“Usually every three or so years we put one together for all of us to share what we do with students and the community. I believe it will be more of a regular thing going forward but definitely not every year just because we don’t want to take up that time slot from all of the other artists that come in.”
