UNCP B.A. Senior Capstone Exhibition
On View: March 29-April 7, 2023
Reception: Friday, March 31, 4:30-5:30 p.m.
Featuring: Cameron Collins, Aly Horn, Donique McLaurin, Leah Moore, Alana Peterson, Jasmin Sanders, and Maggie Trimpe
UNCP senior art students presents their exhibition “Deeply Rooted”. The theme of “Deeply Rooted” is about connections, whether they be those we share with nature and the world around us or those we share our lives and culture with. Students in this exhibition tackle relationships with cultural identity, family, emotions, our environment, and our society. This exhibition shows the growth of everyone’s personal journeys in unique creative ways.
Alana Peterson’s artwork narrates her ongoing battle against depression and anxiety due to having to mature at a young age through surrealistic crime scenes. Her current artwork embodies her own life by studying age, time, and body. The use of fungi and plants demonstrate the consumption of negative events, elements, and people in her life that has caused her to mature at a young age. The use of tools is prevalent in all her pieces to show how attempting to repair one’s mental health is important, but even something helpful can cause more damage. The goal of her pieces is for others to see through their eyes how maturing at a young age can affect one’s mental health and how hard it is to repair it.
Maggie Trimpe's art highlights humanity's relationship with nature, in illustrating flora for science and our parts in establishing invasive species. Playing on a personal story that many of the Southeast can relate to, we see how these imported additions can go wrong and take over the homes they were meant to embellish. Additionally, these ornamental plants become functional as they make up the inks used for their respective prints.
Aly Horn has extensively researched floriography, the language of flowers, and culminated that information into depictions of their meanings in conjunction with human ideas, relationships, and emotional states. Their work stems from the findings and analyzes them in a way that resonates with their view of the world and relationships. The natural world that we all live in communicates human civilization's development. Here there are discussions culminated in the symbolism put behind these floral entities via human ideals in the form of images that are meant to keep the viewer engaged and tell a story similar to how our own ancestors once would with visual storytelling.
When creating these different bodies of work, Donique McLaurin always looks at the situation that he’s currently in right now or what's going on in the world. Sometimes he may create a body of work just to experiment with new materials or techniques. His work is about empowering the African-American community as a whole and how the community must stay connected to their roots, not forgetting those who have passed and fought before us. His end goal is to be an inspiration to other little African-American artists, someone they can look up to…. To be a representation for the black community within the art community.
Leah Moore’s series, Love and Grief, shows a sequence of illustrations that follow the narrative of a man and his cat. With her aspirations of becoming a children’s book illustrator, this series is intrinsically connected to a storybook she is currently in the process of developing. The intention behind Love and Grief is to examine the relationship between these two emotions: a concept was mildly inspired by the quote “What is grief, if not love persevering?” from the Marvel tv show, WandaVision. This relationship between love and grief is not only portrayed through the series’ subject matter, but also through the artist’s consistent use of strong, bold colors despite the representation of “negative” or “sorrowful” emotions. The brightly colored illustrations are meant to show that grief is generated by, and thus inherently infused with, feelings of love and cannot exist without it.
Jasmin Sanders artwork consist of four black women all different colors, including hair color as well. African-Americans started using their hair to symbolize a connection to both their African origins and Black people worldwide. The Afro and the Civil Rights Movement were essential in defining black identity. Some artists expressed themselves through their actual hair. Her artwork also represents how far African Americans came from 300 - 400 years ago and how we’re able to be create and be acknowledged for what we’ve created and since we have this opportunity, she wants to be able to use it for the greater good. It also represents how black women have certain hairstyles that are considered unprofessional and instead of them worrying about our abilities, they worry about something that doesn’t affect our work.
In Cameron Collins three most recent works he is experimenting with photo bashing and digital collage. Each piece shows a different character maneuvering through spaces surround by the products that are advertised to them. His works are meant to show how consumerism negatively effects the consumer.