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Chiquita stickers and descending globes of coiled steel wire with small portal holes greet the entering patron in the University of Maine Lord Hall Gallery. April 2 through 30, the Juried Student Exhibition, a collection of featured works selected by a two-part jury committee, will be open to the public.
The opening and awards ceremony took place April 2. Lord Hall Gallery curator Laurie Hicks described the event as “wonderful and positive” and having “a lot of high energy.” Students from Art Education 474: Topics in Art Education, coordinated an auction to take place during the ceremony, to benefit the Art Creation Foundation for Children, a non-profit arts organization in Jacmel, Haiti.
“We wanted to support something that was intended for art,” Plourde wrote in an e-mail of his class’s choice of the Art Creation Foundation for Children. A class service learning project, the auction brought in a much larger opening-night crowd than usual.
According to Plourde, auction coordinators wanted to make the opening ceremony a larger event providing different outlets for art. Organizers opted to simultaneously host the ceremony and opening event. Auctioned works ranged from elementary school student work to professional works by local artists.
The Juried Student Exhibition “is a long standing tradition in the department,” Hicks said. She has been involved with the exhibit for her 23 years at UMaine and knows the exhibit was an art department mainstay even before her arrival to the university.
Of more than 300 works submitted to the exhibit, 106 were selected. Selections reflect work done in the last year, according to Hicks, and are related to studio art coursework. Submissions must have been completed between last spring’s juried art exhibit and this one.
UMaine student Elizabeth Herron, whose painting “Lands” is featured, explained that her work depicts a summer pastoral scene, painted on-site, and uses of ground and broken color techniques. The blotchy use of bold greens, blues and whites is painted over a mustard yellow base.
The jury process is split into two parts. The first jury, made up of UMaine studio art faculty, makes the preliminary decisions regarding what is and is not included in the exhibit based on particular medium area expertise. The second juried phase is conducted by assistant professor of art ed Nadeau, Hicks and outside juror Elizabeth Finch, a Colby College Museum of Art curator.
Student works ranged from acrylic paintings to braided rugs made of recycled newspapers to spindly red wooden sculptures.
Featured artist Katrina Vaughan spoke of the solidarity celebrated among art students in the juried exhibit.
“That’s where you connect. You can really appreciate it, because you know how hard you’ve worked,” Vaughan said. She explained that this bond shared between art students is put on display and showcased in the juried exhibit — something not done in other majors.
“You can’t really put a research paper on display,” she said.
Vaughan has three works featured and has been in the juried show in the past. Her photo “I Can’t Catch It” was taken for a photography class as a study on light and portraits in order to “achieve what a person is” in a non-traditional form. The black and white photo portrays the back of a woman as she pulls her short hair outward.
Plourde’s “Obsession: Beautiful, Blue” was for a painting class dealing with the issue of scale and how to represent concepts in a larger format. Made up of close to 3,000 Chiquita banana stickers aligned in rows and columns on a recycled canvas, the eye-popping piece is an illustration of the “overwhelming sense of anxiety and order one experiences in being obsessive-compulsive,” Plourde wrote in an e-mail.
Plourde acknowledged the painting’s unconventional, less-than-serious medium, which is the painting’s message.
“One gets an overwhelming visual experience resulting in blurred sense of constant adjustment and refocusing,” Plourde said.
Plourde had difficulties finding the stickers in bulk.
“Picking close to 3,000 [stickers] would be mad,” he said. After several attempts to contact the Cincinnati-headquartered company, he finished the piece last August. The class took place during the last spring semester.
“In trying to focus on the strict order of one set of shapes, whether it’s the positive or negative, you lose the other as it submits to the intended focus,” Plourde said.
In addition to his featured artwork, Plourde was pleased with the auction’s success.
“In combining the auction for Haiti with this event, we make the opening about something much larger than ourselves,” Plourde said in an e-mail.
According to Hicks, the opening night auction brought in about $1,700.
“We had so many people this year, and it was great to see all of the support. We had many people coming up to take a look, but also a lot of serious bidders,” Plourde said.
“It was a very exciting, very positive, celebratory process,” Hicks said.
