"It's terrifying," said Rachelle Moses when describing showing her art at the senior art showcase beginning on March 28, "It's really cool though."
This event will showcase 11 seniors' work and how they have developed as artists. For these students, this experience is everything they have worked for since they entered the doors of 33 Collegeview Road four years ago.
"Students have been working their whole academic career and their major to prepare for the possibility to have enough quality work to be able to hang a show," said Janice Glowski, the museums and galleries director. "It's not hanging pictures on the wall, there's a lot more critical assessment that happens. They need to critique their own work at the level of installation and presentation."
These aspects, according to Glowski, are important for those working as professional artists. The artists are split off into four groups who will each showcase their art for one week before the next group of students presents their pieces. Each artist brings something different and personal to the table.
One of the artists featured in the show, Moses, is a double major in studio art with a painting concentration and psychology. Her group's showcase is titled "Remembrance", which is based on the time they spent at Otterbein and how they have grown as artists and people.
Moses's pieces are mostly hyper-realistic paintings, but also include "tennis ball pieces."
"There's a hundred tennis balls glued together," she said. "You can pick it up, so I'm going to make it interactive. I have another tennis ball thing where I got a bunch of 5-inch by 5-inch canvases and glued a single tennis ball, and made it kinda pop-arty."
For Moses, the inspiration behind these tennis ball pieces hits close to home. "Tennis has been a big part of my life, for all my life," she said. "The prompt is 'everyday' and that's my every day."
Megan Walsh, also a studio art major with a concentration in painting, said that she has seven pieces in the showcase.
"For my show, I've decided to do some bigger canvases and then incorporate different materials to create actual texture that then I paint or collage implied textures over," Walsh said. "They're all pretty abstract, more abstract than I'm used to working with but still representational."
Walsh is inspired by the more academic side of life, whereas Moses draws inspiration from her personal life.
"I randomly came up with this idea when I applied for this Raica [the George R. Raica Fine Arts Endowed Award] project," she said. "They fund you to do some kind of project, whether that is with materials or traveling, so I just had kinda decided for my senior year that I wanted to work on a bigger scale."
Walsh's inspiration also came from uniqueness. "I was trying to come up with something just different. I was kinda into the idea of collaging because I like 2D work," she said. "I'm a painter, but I also really enjoy 2D design and collaging so I just wanted to incorporate that, and I figured while I'm collaging and creating those paper textures on the canvas. Why not just go bigger scale?"
Emotions run high during the showcases. Moses said of the experience, "I'm excited that my family's gonna get to come see it. We put a lot of work into it. We're all really proud."
