Leaden's show featured crystal instillations representative of a "dust-to-dust" metaphor. | Ashley Jones/THE CHIMES
This week the Biola Art Gallery is featuring the senior art shows of students Kevin Burch, Samantha Leaden and Jennifer Trahan. By completing their senior shows, each moves one step closer to graduating and learning to create art in the world outside Biola. Continue stopping by the gallery every Monday at 6 p.m. through the end of the semester to see new shows by graduating art students.
Burch, 22, is a graphic design emphasis from Sacramento. His show is titled “Strangers in the Mirror.”
Q: Where did the title of your show come from?
A: I guess I’m dealing with the idea of this disease called ‘face blindness.’ It doesn’t let you recognize faces, so you can’t recognize people close to you, so you could be talking to someone and five minutes later not recognize them. I wanted to do something where I put myself through a process of experiencing that, and also so that the viewers kind of get a feel for it and experience it also. I guess the title is like the concept of not being able to recognize anyone or anything, even looking in the mirror as a place for comfort to see yourself… but if you see someone you don’t recognize, it’s a stranger in the mirror.
Q: What medium did you work in?
A: I drew a hundred drawings of four different people that were just pen and ink on paper. Then I scanned all those in and made a video, then I’m projecting them onto a black and white acrylic paint.
Q: What has the process been like for you?
A: It’s been interesting trying to think through this kind of a context, trying to figure out what to do for a gallery setting. I think as a designer and illustrator it’s usually geared towards specific projects, so having to find something interesting and try to solve that problem in a gallery context was interesting. And then specifically actually going through this and drawing people 100 times, so I did 400 drawings total. They’re not realistic or crazy detailed or anything but it just kind of helped me find my hand.
Q: What has been most challenging?
A: I think just overall figuring out what to do, because I’ve had different ideas and iterations kind of dealing with the same idea, trying to find one that I was excited about and use the skills I’ve wanted to.
Q: What is your greatest ‘take-away’ as a Biola art major?
A: I would say just learning to think through ideas and concepts or find concepts, how to do that as a Christian artist. I’ve learned tons of stuff skill-wise, I mean, I wouldn’t be here without the Biola art department. I think biggest is critical thinking, thinking through ideas, and critiquing work, all that stuff.
Leaden, 21, is a sculpture emphasis also from Sacramento. Her show “Between this Day and the Next” is a small-scale sculpture series with the thesis of crystals.
Q: What medium did you work in? Give us a brief description of your show.
A: Mainly cement, fleece, pine, glass, and then the crystals are alum crystals, borax crystals and salt crystals. I want it to be appreciated formally, so there’s positive and negative space, and it lines up with color, which is pale pine, pinks, browns, silver. But the conversation I want to hold is about what crystals mean to me since I’ve been using them all year. You set them up in the water and they grow and they’re really ephemeral and they’re really playful and they’re really mysterious, you don’t know how it will turn out. But you leave it for over night and the next morning you pull it out of the water and it will stay and cling to most objects.
So the crystals, you take them out of the water and they enter a state of decay where they just slowly fall apart. If you sit quietly, I don’t know how long it will take, but you can sometimes hear them fall off the objects they are growing to. They are full of life in the water but as soon as you take them out they are full of decay and falling apart and they eventually turn back into the powder, so it’s very literal dust-to-dust metaphor. So, I relate that to life, and this work is relating crystals to a domestic space so they’re vessels, there’s bowls, there’s glass, there’s shoes, there’s clothes, there’s everyday objects. I feel like some of the cement and the steel wool is like the after effect of the negative space of those same objects, and it’s crazy because the fleece actually kind of looks like skin almost, there’s a very skin-like quality in some of this.
Q: Where did you draw your greatest inspiration?
A: Katherine Long, her show last semester, it was very personal, but it was detached enough where you could enter into the work and enjoy it… at the same time it was really, like she held it so close and it was really dear to her, it was just really ephemeral and beautiful, so I really enjoyed her work. And I just like elite materials, like how does that work? That was definitely crystals. The material itself was really fun to work with, and so full of character, like sometimes it doesn’t work and sometimes it works. And with light it’s like a completely different person, so it’s crazy.
Q: What has the process been like for you?
A: Trial and error, I don’t know. My studio is very messy, a lot of work. I don’t know, just seeing if it feels good on the shelf, if it feels good next to something else… even if you can’t see it how I see it, in relation to the body or what life is, I would like it to be appreciated formally at least, with colors lining up, things feeling right next to each other in a domestic space.
Q: What was most challenging?
A: The lab coat is up on the top right of the piece, and it’s my mom’s lab coat, and she passed away last year. So it’s dealing with that, what came out of struggling through all of this and not knowing how it’s going to turn out, not knowing what I was doing exactly, but feeling really called to make this work. Even though these crystals are in a state of decay, they are like us, they’re going to fall apart someday and turn back to dust, they’re still beautiful and still shining, even though they had to go through this process of birth and such, they’re crazy beautiful. I don’t want to put the lab coat in the work, but I feel like the lab coat needs to go up there, that’s probably the hardest part.
Q: What are you looking forward to after graduation?
A: I have a few trips planned, so I’m going to travel around a little bit. All over the place, Florida, Washington, Hawaii, New York, but ending up for a few months in Seattle, and hopefully I’ll move back to LA after. Then I’ll start looking for a job in November, December, back in LA.
Q: What is your greatest ‘take-away’ as a Biola art major?
A: Well, when I was assigned a project or started a project, I would always start out by thinking of some ridiculous idea, like some crazy idea that was super ambitious, that was really off the wall, probably out of my realms of craftsmanship. I would always aim really ambitious, and then when I was making the work, I would always come to a part where I would realize, ‘Oh this actually doesn’t work out like this!’ Like, ‘The rules of gravity still apply here!’
But after I would realize it couldn’t work, I would realize I still can make this work, but I would always have that crisis moment with every project, like ‘Oh, this doesn’t work.’ But I was always able to figure out a way to come off that crisis moment, and I’ve been so rewarded for all that hard work. I’ve been proud of every piece and every piece is a piece of me, and I’m proud of what I do. So that’s great. And I feel like I’ve learned first hand of what grace looks like, what grace tangibly feels like, I guess, with the Art Department, there’s just so many good people.
Trahan, 21, a photography emphasis from Palm Desert, did a photo series called “Through the Valley” about journeying through the valley of her home, Coachella Valley, once again.
Q: What medium did you work in? Give us a brief description of your show.
A: I worked in digital photo. ‘Through the Valley’ is a collection of thirteen images that is kind of about my revisiting of my home. As a college student, we leave our home to come to a new temporary place that we can choose to make our home, and then because it’s temporary, we have to go out and create a new home post-graduation. So just in thinking and dealing with all that, I decided to do my project about my home that I know will be my home forever, even if I’m not living there.
Q: Where did you draw your greatest inspiration?
A: Robert Voigt is an artist who I love, and Alec Soth. Robert Voigt does these beautiful portraits of fake trees. They’re portraits of these landscapes almost, but this man-made tower is essentially what the picture’s about, and that’s just so interesting. And Alec Soth does a lot of different work.
Q: What has the process been like for you?
A: It’s been really difficult because senior shows are kind of this huge thing that you work up to and hear all about as freshmen and sophomores, and then your junior year you know that it’s the next year that you have to do your senior show. So it’s this long, emotional year-long process, and along the way most people I think become frustrated or angry or confused or lost or apathetic, and I think at least at one point I probably felt all of those emotions. I even changed my idea a couple months ago, and then changed it back to my original idea, but have constantly been building off of similar concepts. Arriving at ‘Through the Valley’ felt good and it felt right. It’s definitely a long and windy road, but I’m happy with where I’ve ended up.
Q: What was most challenging?
A: I think feeling settled and arriving at a concept and an idea that I felt comfortable sharing with others. Knowing that my work would be in front of an audience is a scary thought, and it’s something I think that as an artist you have to come to embrace. My work will be seen, and I need to decide how I want to present myself and how I want my work to be read. So I think just thinking about that and struggling with that thought was really difficult and kept me very fearful a lot of the time.
Q: What are you looking forward to after graduation?
A: Well I’m moving to New York a few days after I graduate, and I’m going to be joining a marketing and advertising firm as part of the creative team. I’m really nervous about that, just being in a new city, across the country, new people, and so I’m anxious but I’m really excited about that, just seeing where that takes me.
Q: What is your greatest ‘take-away’ as a Biola art major?
A: I think being in community with creative people has caused me to seek and look into my own life and find where my heart is within the arts and where I place myself in a community full of artists. You definitely have to know who you are, and it’s hard to know who you are when your voice is one of many, especially of so many talented people. So I think learning to find my voice within this community of loving and forgiving artists has been just something that, I mean, you can’t buy that, you can’t experience that except from natural, good community.
