On Friday, April 15, art lovers gathered at the Scarfone-Hartley Art Gallery for the opening reception of the Annual Juried Student Exhibition. Students submitted work and faculty members selected the best from the submissions.
Adam Justice picked finalists and assigned the Friends of the Gallery Award, the Las Damas de Arte Award for individual pieces and the Las Damas de Arte Award for three student bodies of work.
Justice is the Curator of Art at the Polk Museum of Art in Lakeland, Fla. He has been the director of numerous museums, taught art history and creates art in his own studio at home.
The awards had three different categories and 11 winners. The winners for the Las Damas de Arte Body of Work Award were William Stryffeler ($800); Sam Burns ($600); and Princess Smith ($500). Burns is a senior fine arts major who plans to attend Florida State University for grad school. She said her favorite piece is Vitam Aeternam, which loosely translated as “For All Time.” She said that the piece took her over five months to complete.
”This work conceptually deals with the journey I went on while trying to recover from a traumatic head injury,” Burns said. She layered “non-traditional elements” in this mixed media work, including sand, cheese cloth and wood stain.
“With each new layer, this piece grew everyday, and helped me understand a new way to approach a subject,” Burns said.
For the next award, the Las Damas de Arte Individual Work Award, the winners were Lisa Harasiuk, for her piece It Doesn’t Matter, Nobody is Listening Anyway or Conversations with Myself; Jeremy Bell for his painting Scent of a Divine Diva; William Stryffeler for his ceramic piece Nature Imitates and Evolves; and Tiffany Huettermann for her piece Deception. All of the students received a $250 prize.
Harasiuk is a senior fine arts major with plans to continue at UT for a master’s of education. She said that her piece It Doesn’t Matter was inspired by the idea of making soup can phones to have secret conversations with your friends. This piece is mixed media, Harasiuk’s preferred method.
She said the latex represents bouncing around of ideas and the old rope and wood are age-old things people have used for years.
In the Friends of the Gallery Awards, also for individual works, the winners were Princess Smith for her piece Self Portrait; Shannon Kenny for her piece Why’d You Have to Seduce Me; Sam Burns for her piece Au Pair; and Cliff Klein for his piece Surveillance. Each of these students won $150 for their pieces.
Kenny is a senior with a focus on art therapy with plans to attend the New York Academy of Art next fall. She said her piece Why’d You Have to Seduce Me is made completely out of cigarettes.
“For this piece, I collected cigarettes around campus from every ash tray I could spot, in addition to the ones I found on the ground,” Kenny said. She said that she creates pieces that tend to make the viewer question his or her beliefs, and this piece was targeted towards the seductive qualities of smoking.
The gallery will remain open until next Thursday, April 28.
Next time you are walking past the Bailey Art Studio, stop in and take a look around.
Laurel Sanchez can be reached at laurel.sanchez1@gmail.com.