Friday, April 12, 2002
Volume 66, Number 16

Senior artists in person after their exhibit opens

by Elizabeth Miller, Mari Ushiroda, and Jovanna Schussel

The Senior Art Exhibition opened April 4 with a reception as part of First Thursday. The 23 students featured in the display are Katherine Atwood, Cayley bell, Ariel A. Brice, Adam Bruke, Elizabeth Ann Cain, Jessica Castillo, Joe Cerizo, Elizabeth A. Crites, Kira Fogarty, Marta Klepinski, Kelly Knapp, Shelley Hedlund, Morgan Law, Lauryn Mangat, Annie Matson, Mariana Orantes, Aaron Pilcher, Cecily Pingree, Katherine Roche, Kathryn Sheehan, Leah Svendsen, Nigel Tibbles and Tad Williams.

The following are profiles of ten of these seniors in a series continued from the March 22 issue of the Pioneer Log.

Jessica Castillo : painter

Five portrait pieces in a series attempting to interpret and present people through the use of a fantasy landscape were Jessica Castillo's contribution to the art exhibit. "With a background largely dedicated to figurative work, I found it natural to want to delve into portraiture," she said.

Castillo said the project provided her with insights as well as problems. "Being involved with trying to present a personal/intimate look at an individual, I found myself learning that my ideas of those persons took over how the composition was finally done. The process became less to do with how people saw themselves, but instead how I saw them," she said.

The pieces she found to be the most successful had inventive backgrounds and a comfortable posing of the people represented. "Where some appear stiff and rigid among their surroundings, others, though still the central image, bend with the natural objects and mimic the energy and feeling of the elements around them," she said.

Castillo dates her artistic interests to her parents telling her she had the best drawn rainbows and flowers in preschool. She later attended almost every summer class at the Portland Northwest College of Art as a child and a teenager. She went to art school in Philadelphia, but found her imagination impeded. At LC she was able to nurture her imagination and expand her subjects.

In this exhibit, her work combines an old and a new style. "The attention to the figure remains constant but the setting is new to my hand," she said. "I think my great success is if this experience spurs me on to shape a style that works and is engaging to myself and others," she said. She hopes speak her mind through her art, and in pursuit of that style will keep thinking and continue producing.

Joe Cerizo : digital creator

Senior artist, Joe Cerizo completed his senior project with digital illustrations of three images depicting naturalistic lighting effects.

"Processional Hall of Djoser," "Processional Hall of Bacchus," and "Artist in her Studio" are Cerizo's senior art pieces that are featured in the Contemporary Art Gallery.

"Processional Hall of Djoser" is a digital illustration of an Egyptian Hall. "Processional Hall of Bacchus" is a hall that follows the style of a classical antiquity. "Artist in her Studio" captures a young female industriously working with her ceramic piece in an intimate art studio setting.

Cerizo's computer generated and digitally illustrated art pieces appear as if they are actual paintings or photographs. All three emphasize lighting and composition.

"Artist in her Studio" carries many meanings for Cerizo. "It is my tribute to elevating the arts of all mediums," Cerizo said. Within the image are certain objects that represent different mediums such as a paintbrush to painting, sketches to drawing, vessels to craft, sculpture and ceramics, and the concept of photography through the design process. Cerizo digitally illustrated the image to elevate the latest medium of contemporary art.

Cerizo finds inspiration for a lot of his artwork through instrumental music. "Lyrics are specific, defining and confining. But with instrumental music, it's like the same song never plays quite the same; it can be perceived in different ways," Cerizo said.

Cerizo taught himself digital illustration at age 16 and has been learning since then. He prefers digital illustration to any other medium. "I see something in my head, I'm not a great drawer, or writer, or painter, I see the computer and it gives me the freedom to create," Cerizo said.

Cerizo's plans for the future include working for an animation/post production studio. His dream is to become an animator and produce his own animated film short and win Oscars.

Elizabeth Crites : graphic designer

Elizabeth Crites employed graphic design to create three scrolls of Portland, the Chinese Garden, and the Japanese Garden. Her interest in the art of scroll making and a desire to explore scroll making as a narrative in an art form led her to choose this as her contribution to the senior art exhibit.

"I wanted to explore authenticity in scroll making as well as modernity. I created two scrolls that adhered more strictly to old fashioned scrolls and one that put a modern twist on the old art form," she said. The scrolls narrate her journey through the Chinese and Japanese Gardens and through Portland.

Her work in graphic design became something she seriously pursued during high school. Through college she has produced a few other projects in scroll format and those endeavors culminated in her senior project. She attributes the source for the focus of her project to scrolls she saw during Japanese and Chinese art classes.

Crites hopes to work in the field of graphic design after graduation and plans to eventually teach graphic design.

Kira Fogarty : painter

At some point in childhood, most of us have created our own personal "masterpieces" with paint-by-numbers drawings. Kira Fogarty has taken this concept and turned it into a true work of art, using this well-known look to comment on society and her connection to it.

Her contribution to the Senior Art Exhibition was a group of four paintings entitled "Is White a Color?," and a group of 10 painting entitled "What Color is White?" In these works, Kira expresses the disconnection that she feels with the culture around her and the difficulty she has in identifying herself with a specific color group, as society likes to label people as white, black, yellow, etc.

"The work is a visual play on words in which I have taken images of myself out of the natural and into an artificial method of reassigning color. The incomplete paint-by-number self-portraits illustrate my inability to locate my personal identity in terms of race and culture," Kira said, in her artist's statement.

Kira has always had an interest in art and came to Lewis & Clark College planning on being an art major. Although she has focused on painting, this was a random selection and she also enjoys working in other media of art.

Upon graduating this spring, Kira plans to take a break from school, but eventually thinks that she might want to be a high school art teacher. She will eventually pursue a master's degree in art education, but for now, she is enjoying seeing the culmination of four years of hard work at LC.

Shelley Hedlund : chalk pastel artist

"Portrait of Us", a series of five chalk pastel portraits, was done by Shelley Hedlund. Each portrait includes a writing completed by the person represented after Hedlund interviewed them about their feelings toward and experiences with discrimination. Hedlund says she was trying to discover personal stories about discrimination to complement the faces of the people who had experienced these moments in their lives.

"I chose this project because I constantly see the oppression of our hierarchically based government and the minds of people who do not know anything other than tolerance (not acceptance and understanding) pushing down and silencing people who are misrepresented, misunderstood and who have almost no options in this country," she said.

Hedlund hopes her work will force people to think about their own lives and how they perceive people different from themselves. She also hopes people will realize how minor the differences between people really are, particularly compared to what people have in common.

A lifetime artist, Hedlund said, "It has been a refuge and an enemy at times. But, indeed despite the challenges it is my first love," she said.

Hedlund said she has been profoundly affected by this project. Through the course of her interviews with people she was able to connect with people as she struggled to understand their perspective and handle herself so they could be open with her about the personal subjects she was asking them to discuss.

She hopes to continue her career as an artist, and is considering teaching. She has three commissions this summer and her work will be in a show at the Coos Bay Art Museum that opens May 10. She also plans to further her work with this project and explore ways the subject matter may become more powerful.

Marta Klepinski: clay sculptor

Marta Klepinski's project is a collection of clay house structures. "[The houses] are precarious in nature, full of tension and movement," she said.

Klepinski worked with the ideas of family communication and relationships that can hold together or destroy a household.

She chose the medium of ceramics and over the last year has tested the boundaries of the medium, seeing how tall she could build a structure and how precarious it could be. Through many broken efforts she learned how to handle the technical aspects of the project. "One piece in the show was built inside a kiln in order to achieve the size and shape of two permanent interlocking pieces," she said.

Kelly Knapp : minimalist sculptor

Kelly Knapp contributed minimalist wall sculptures created from materials found in Portland warehouses. "I have a fascination with materials, especially everyday industrial pipe," she said. These pieces are similar to some work she has done in the past, but more refined.

Knapp said she chose this project to further her understanding of art by exploring questions plaguing her about what constituted art and why, questions she felt she needed answers to before she could graduate and call herself an art major. "I decided to explore my questions through minimalism. Minimalism was a way I could par things down and discover why a simple wooden triangle was in the pages of an art history book," she said.

The arts have been a part of her life since childhood; she has been playing music since the age of five and did ballet for ten years. Her involvement in studio art began with a ceramics class she took on a whim her freshman year. After enjoying ceramics, she decided to take sculpture. To get into a sculpture class to be with some people she enjoyed, she had to declare herself an art major.

"Since then I have fallen in love with art and don't think there would have been a better fit for me," she said. She says fashion, interior design, and architecture are really what she is passionate about, and she hopes to put together a portfolio over the next few years to apply to design school in New York.

Lauryn Mangat : painter

Brilliantly colored landscape paintings done in acrylic paint on fabric were completed by Lauryn Mangat. She said she chose the project in the interest of combining her love of fabric with paint and her love of the mountains. "I didn't want to do typical landscape, and what I have done in the show just sort of evolved over time," she said.

According to Mangat, there are no hidden meanings, her project is about color, landscape and expressing her feelings toward those things.

Since she was a small child Mangat has loved art and known she wanted to be an artist. Her mother, also an artist, has been an influence and an inspiration for her. She came to LC with the intention of working in ceramics, but fell in love with painting.

Cecily Pingree : wood sculptor

Cecily Pingree's "Direction of Grain" features nine wood forms of the bellies of pregnant women in each month of pregnancy paired with a sound recording.

She chose the project to interact with different people and to allow her art to exercise her fascination with stories. A total of thirteen women participated in her project, responding to ads she placed, and worked under the condition that they would receive a mold of their belly in the end.

Pingree took plaster molds of their bellies, then used the plaster molds as templates to inlay wood. She chose a different wood for each month, stripped the wood, steamed it, and laid it into the plaster mold to reproduce the shape of the belly.

For the sound recording portion of her piece, she interviewed numerous people with the single question of "Where you do come from?" and allowed them to respond according to how they interpreted the question.

Nine clips from the varied responses were paired with a Bach cello suite and are played from two speakers, one behind "1 Month" and the second behind "9 Months."

The project gave her an opportunity to interact with a collection of people and allow their lives to be absorbed and integrated into her art.

Pingree attributes her interest in art to her childhood home, a coastal island off Maine, and the area locals. "These characters, these stories, these sights, these faces, cause me to want to build and create." According to Pingree, her home is the hub of her art.

She chose wood in particular because of her fascination with the ability to create pieces that are both functional and non-functional from it. The sound portion came from her interests in sound and film that have developed in the past year.

Leah Svendsen : painter

Leah Svendsen's project was five paintings on birch hardwood depicting the same street scene at different times of a day. She inlaid glass in areas chiseled out of the wood to illustrate fragility in lives humans have made for themselves and for their children.

The inspiration for her project came from her two-and-a-half year old daughter, Haven, who she says is the most precious part of her life. "I have many concerns for her future and feel helpless in solving problems of pollution, disease, war, etc. in order to ensure her a peaceful life. I feel that my project is a reminder to me that I must find a way to make a difference," she said.

Svendsen has loved drawing since she was eight years old and challenged herself by attempting to render figures from fairy tale books. She took art classes in high school and came to LC in 1995 hoping to discover an area of academics that interested her and found it in creating. She took three years off to have her daughter and returned this year to complete her degree.

In 1997 her work as shown in the Wallowa County Festival of the Arts, and two of those drawings are hanging in a bar at Billy Reed's in Northeast Portland.

"I have done a few commissioned drawings and a painting in the past. It was a good experience that made me realize that I would much rather create work on my own ideas," she said.

Working on her senior project has been a unique and meaningful experiences for her."It was a valuable experience on following through with an ambitious project while raising my daughter, a constant reminder and reason to continue with the series idea," she said.

She plans to pursue a career in art, and may begin by teaching after school art class to children in a grant-type program still being developed.

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Alternative suicide music

by Matt Feitelberg

If Mogwai's Rock Action is a pleasing yet daunting album to which I regularly kill myself, Sigur RŪs' ·gŹtis Byrjum is the album that finds me on the bathroom floor, with wrists bleeding and my face whiter than a bowl of rice in a glass of milk in a snow storm.

Noted by many as two artists with a couple of the top albums of 2001, both Mogwai and Sigur RŪs manage to penetrate whatever listening nerves have rested so dormantly throughout the redundancy of whatever we're calling the current fads on the radio. Although the two are all but the same, they were paired on tour, so there's no harm in pairing them on paper.

To start with the Scots, Mogwai gave us Rock Action. Musically profound, with skilled guitars and non-raspy male vocals, Mogwai fills their newest CD with about forty minutes of sounds that seem like an hour and march like an unseen army, while somehow dancing and twisting like a giant ribbon in a tornado.

Although tracks like "Sine Wave," the album opener, and "Dial: Revenge" are almost intimidating in their creativity and uniqueness amongst the void of talent currently wreaking havoc on music lovers, Rock Action is comfortable listening, at least, and so much more upon closer inspection.

It should be noted that band members of Mogwai have been known to be a bit moody, somewhere in between the stylings of Johnny Rotten (aka John Lydon) or bratty Liam Gallagher of Oasis, with differences manifesting atop the fact that the members of Mogwai have talent, with proof in the music (with the lack of talent focused on Oasis, not Sex Pistols).

Example: after the release of their second album "Come on Die Young," in 1999, the boys of Mogwai began the distribution of "Blur: Are Shite" T-shirts, much to the disappointment of Blur/Gorillaz man Damon Albarn/2-D.

At any rate, the minimalist in me pegs Rock Action as aesthetically pleasing and a true oasis or even a mirage in the face of disaster, and the loquacious poet recognizes the band as a blossoming black rose, glorious and wise, yet ephemeral and empty-chested. The music is gloomy and refuses to depend too much on vocals, instead orienting on instruments and developing a smooth quality.

While it's difficult to say that Mogwai both makes me love music and want to die, all at the same time, I hold them in the highest regard, with one proposal. Perhaps the album should come with a disclaimer: Do not listen to while walking long distances in the rain or sitting on a bench, watching the elderly push shopping carts full of groceries.

Budding from a realm of vibration whose exquisiteness I so rarely have the privilege of experiencing, in their album, ·gŹtis Byrjum, Sigur RŪs packs about a dozen lifetimes worth of smiles and smog-blocked sunsets into over an hour of sounds so wonderful that I can't always bare to listen with my eyes open.

In fact, with headphones on an airplane, I decided the situation was far too textbook (too perfect), and ceased listening, in fear of the plane crashing into a rocky urban abyss, with me, sitting calmly, hearing nothing more or less than the track "Star·lfur." And I'm not exaggerating!

Although they are perhaps the only other thing to come out of Iceland in my lifetime, I freely attest that, next to Bjork, Sigur RŪs, or Victory Rose as translation would have it, is the best thing to come out of Iceland in as long as my memory serves me.

In spite of my inability to understand the Icelandic lyrics, as well as those of a made up "pretty" language, the angelic voices and melodies orchestrated so candidly and gorged with color, succeed tremendously in transforming any mood or environment into a lucid yet dreamlike world of infinite sight and compassion.

Thus, after taking its seat at the top of the Icelandic charts for more than a short time, Sigur RŪs's third album, ·gŹtis Byrjum, translating into "A Nice Beginning" or "A New Start," traveled abroad, not reaching the US until May of last year, to meet the CD players and ears of the rest of the world.

Whereas in 2000 the Icelandic music awards recognized Sigur RŪs and ·gŹtis Byrjum as both the best band and best album of the year, it seems that the bulk of praise in this country has come from fans, which are a-plenty.

Their music combines symphony with synth and guitar with violin bow and never lets go of its listener, even after the CD has stopped spinning. My best offer for an explanation is one of fantasy-like rides down rainbow shoots flowing with ichor and margarita mix.

Both albums are as precious as that first snowball, scraped from the hoods and trunks of parked cars, before the ground has turned soft and white.

Mogwai's name seems to hold the same importance of Gizmo in "Gremlins." Sure, he looked cuddly and innocent, but a little neglect and a few drops of water sent him hurling evil zygotes from his back. (And we all know what happened when his spawns got hold of some chicken after midnight).

Well, the same goes for the band, Mogwai. Not that they'll turn into evil creatures and start tearing off the faces of your neighbors, but that they consist of much more than the average "Super Furry Animal" and pack a lot more drama than most other bands.

Throughout both albums, Mogwai and Sigur RŪs remain dynamic and melancholy, calming and awakening, cold yet heartfelt and fully able to invoke tears and attentive ears. Where Mogwai is gray and stormy, Sigur RŪs is orange and optimistic.

The only times they've left my stereo since I've gotten them is when friends have stolen them for a listen or a burn. I highly recommend both!