BFA THESIS 2015

We are the BFA graduating class of 2015. ><>><><><><><><> Get to know us by following our weekly updates, which will be highlighting four students, showing a sneak peak into their studios and art making practices. Click 'Archive' to see all the posts from our lovely class. ><><><><><><><>< Follow us on Instagram! #OCACThesis2015

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Melina Bishop

Drawing on the writings of Anne Hollander about the relationship between the human body and clothing as it has been depicted in art throughout human history, Between Folds and Form is a sentence in that dialogue between the idealized folds of fabric and the intimate reality of the human forms that such drapery seeks to aestheticize and conceal. Intentionally playing on the inherent relationship between this exhibition space and a store window, the installation seeks to subvert the traditional vocabulary of retail merchandizing. Impracticality, non-functionality and peculiar details confirm that while these objects speak of commodity, they themselves are simply evocative replacements, using the viewers pre-existing associations as an inlet into their consciousness. The two main forms presented are representative of the two sides of this on-going conversation but moments of formal and material overlap suggesting that there is a space of compromise in which body informs cloth and cloth informs body in a way that is empathetic and mutually respectful.

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Christiana Hedlund

In my thesis I've worked both representationally doing realistic self portraits and more intuitively doing symbolic patterned work. The image above is still in progress but is an example of the symbolic painting I've been working on.

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Joni Yates

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Michele Krankkala

“You only hear about this place in history books” -Resident of Atlanta, Idaho.

I am currently using alternative process photography to create black and white images on glass. The images come from the two towns, Rocky Bar and Atlanta, nearly abandoned mining towns located in central Idaho.

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Christian Dray

I am making one hundred turned wooden vessels. The point of this is to acquire a working knowledge of how to turn- not to achieve one perfect piece. I am more interested in the journey from novice to craftsman than any single vessel. The vessels I turn will be the record of the knowledge I attain.

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Julia Shahvar 

Sculpting like mad...

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Megan Wainwright

For my thesis I am making paintings and prints that represent my experience of backpacking/hiking in the wilderness. These images capture my curiosity of nature and the closeness that I experience when immersed in the forest. I’m using sketches, photographs, writing, and natural material as resources to create these images. My art ranges in size from large, medium, to small scale.

In painting I’m recreating my experience using house paint as underlayers creating a range of color and textures; then using my resources I recreate my experience through oil paint.

In printmaking, I’m making copper plate etching, woodblocks, linoleum-cuts, screenprinting, and monotype. I’m capturing my experience by making a few sets of limited editions. The images were created through observational drawing of my surroundings of the hikes I’ve walked recently, including,  Mt St Helen, Mt Hood (Salmon Creek), and Forest park.  

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Steve Tull

I’ve been working with fictional literary characters to be made into ceramic sculptures formed into the way I’ve imagined them.  The following quote is about a sea captain named Wolf Larsen described by the narrator, a bookish and awestruck Humphrey Van Weyden.

"The face, with large features and strong lines, of the square order, yet well filled out, was apparently massive at first sight; but again, as with the body, the massiveness seemed to vanish and a conviction to grow of tremendous and excessive mental or spiritual strength that lay behind, sleeping in the depths of his being.  The jaw, the chin, the brow rising to goodly height and swelling heavily above the eyes, --these while strong in themselves, unusually strong, seemed to speak of an immense vigor or virility of spirit that lay behind and beyond and out of site.  There was no sounding such a spirit, no measuring, no determining of metes and bounds, nor neatly classifying in some pigeonhole with others of similar type."

-----The Sea Wolf (chapter 3) by Jack London

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Hello, friends! We have launched a Kickstarter campaign so that we can put together an amazing exhibition. We have 16 days left to reach our goal, and we need all the help we can get! I’m reaching out to all of you lovelies, and even if you can’t donate, please, please share! Anyone and anything can help!

The funds collected through our Kickstarter will allow us to present Generative Consensus, a two-week off-campus exhibition of our thesis work, this May, in Portland Oregon.

Check out our blog to see the immense talent you’d be supporting!

Here’s the link:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1321821357/generative-consensus-ocac-class-of-2015/description

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Emily Greaney

A face hidden, unlooking yet looking to be seen. Hands cradle and caress and gently pull you in deeper and deeper.

As the gouache and watercolor wandered over the surface of the panel, I, too, reacted to the layered imagery breathing from the surface. Affirmative thoughts tended to happen—reminders of thoughts I had from months or even years ago. I remembered thinking about the life hidden within the forest, the woven, webbed secrets gently shimmering and undulating through the trees.

Eventually, I began to realize a measure of irony with my process and the work coming from it. As I was making each piece, I was starting to be more conscious of the experience of replicating an intangible experience. It became a spiritual event trying to recreate a spiritual event. Feeling and ritual creation.

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Molly Eno

There is a story that is changing beneath me. It is collapsing, splitting wide open at the seams. It’s about a boy and a trampoline and a man who owns a restaurant. It’s about my mother, her hair mussed with dirt and dried leaves, my father, whose teeth have all fallen out. It’s about trying to be honest and in trying I said I have been down for so long. But this too I have come through.

All the college girls make art out of Barbie Dolls, hairless and headless, lynched high from wire coat hangers and badly beaten metaphors. “Look how hard it is to be a woman” they say.

“Look how hard it is to be a Barbie Doll,” I say.

I have never been much of a woman.

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Josh Pew

To be an artist is to be a hunter. You’re always looking for that right material, that right process to serve your purposes of expression. Some of the most satisfying experiences is when a new material is introduced that fulfills the original concept better than expected. Originally I was planning on working with glass mirror, which is rigid and time-consuming to clean up the edges. Thankfully I stumbled upon acrylic mirror. This might seem like a simple change to most, but for me, it gives me those giggles that I get when I’m about to see a movie I’ve been waiting for all year.

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Ciarra Lord

I have been thinking a lot about the materiality of cardboard. We all know what cardboard is, and use it in our everyday lives. We are attached to it, but have so little connection to it.

By mimicking nature, rather than copying it, my sculptures explore the relationship between the processed banal and our connection with the natural world. My pieces are designed to evoke feelings contrary to those normally associated with the materials from which they are made. 

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Emma Weber

Some paintings in process!

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Lissette Banda

It's been an interesting journey with lots of twists and turns, but I've finally honed in on a subject. Before winter break, I found an image of a small Mexican boy being held at a detainment center in Arizona. I enlarged it on a copy machine and wheat pasted it onto a wooden panel. The layers of paint that followed, transformed him into an "illegal alien" by changing his skin green and giving him characteristics that associated him to be out of this world. I literally found myself at the border concerning this prevalent issue. In December, I visited the town of Rosarito, which borders Mexico and the U.S. I went to see the fence that stretched all the way into the ocean. What interested me most were the items left behind. What was the story connected to them and the place they reached? I realized they were of some significance to the people who left them and the people who were meant to find them. The items themselves seemed alive to me and had gone through a journey carrying with them the care and consideration of the person who parted from them. Without exposing too much of my thesis I will say that I have returned my focus on mass production in order to spread the word. I hope that the audience will look and think twice about the post of a desperate person seeking their lost item.

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Generative Consensus: Kickstarter!

Hello, friends! We have launched a Kickstarter campaign so that we can put together an amazing exhibition. We have 23 days left to reach our goal, and we need all the help we can get! I'm reaching out to all of you lovelies, and even if you can't donate, please, please share! Anyone and anything can help!

The funds collected through our Kickstarter will allow us to present Generative Consensus, a two-week off-campus exhibition of our thesis work, this May, in Portland Oregon.

Check out our blog to see the immense talent you'd be supporting!

Here's the link:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1321821357/generative-consensus-ocac-class-of-2015/description

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Jordan Pieper

Porcelain, gold lustre, cobalt, gold leaf and flocking will be utilized in the wares. The forms are suggestive of the body and heavy surface ornamentation will accentuate the sprigged details. I am interested in creating objects of exclusivity, much like the objects that surrounded the nobility during the Rococo, Baroque and Art Nouveau eras.