Artists in the Plattsburgh State Bachelor’s of Fine Arts Program are showcasing their art at the BFA exhibit currently on display in the Myers Lobby Gallery.
The students have been working since the beginning of fall semester to create a diverse collection of pieces.
“The special thing about this show is there are seven students in this show, and all seven disciplines are represented ceramics, printmaking, painting, drawing, photography, graphics design and sculpture,” Madison Rosier, a senior earning a BFA with a concentration in ceramics and compliment in printmaking, said.
Rosier and her husband Christopher Rosier came to Plattsburgh State in the spring of 2017 to pursue their shared love of art.
Madison Rosier has several pottery sets on display along with a wall of her printmaking. She draws inspiration from the colors and forms of the natural world as well as “the intersection of domesticity and spirituality.”
“I’ve found that I like functional pottery because [of] the idea that people will be sharing togetherness when they use the pots,” Madison Rosier said.
In the middle of her firing process, maintenance workers shut off the ventilation, tampering with the testing they had been doing for months to get the kiln to work properly.
When her pots came out in shades of red and orange rather than the blue it was supposed to be, a worker asked, “Can’t she just do it again?”
Although she faced unexpected hurdles with a set of her pots, she was able to reflect and channel her energy creatively into her printmaking.
“I felt like my show-work had been stolen from me at that point because I had this vision and this language that I wanted to use that my professor and I had prepared,” Madison Rosier said. “In the wake of that, the art department was so supportive and kind to me and was so sympathetic. My printmaking professor said, ‘Why don’t you use this energy productively?’ So I made this piece which is basically a journal entry that explains what happened and how I felt about it.”
The print is written in small penmanship except for “Can’t she just do it again?” which is written larger, about a quarter of the way up from the bottom. She had to write all the words backward for it to show up readable.
Christopher Rosier will also be graduating in May with a BFA, a concentration in drawing and a compliment in painting. He uses his art to capture moments in his life as a way of preserving them.
His paintings capture picturesque nearby locations, some of which he painted in plain air, going to the location with his supplies and painted it right then and there. His drawings that are on display serve the same purpose of preservation, but instead of nature, they are of Madison Rosier and himself.
“It’s really important to me to mark these times in my life and use the art to speak to these moments in my life, and sort of record them and use them in a similar way to if you were to take a photograph,” Christopher Rosier said.
One of his drawings shows Madison Rosier sitting, wearing a large floppy hat and holding a mug.
“It might just be a girl in a hat drinking something, but obviously it’s more than that,” Christopher Rosier said. “It translates to me.”
Graphic design is represented in the exhibit in several forms. Jackie Ta, BFA senior concentrating in painting and graphic design, created soap containers and designed brightly colored ice cream cone boxes that can be used as puppets when the cones have run out.
“There’s a lot of engineering and craftsmanship,” Ta said. “The illustration is easier to make than the calculations.”
Ta also has a series of paintings to which she applies her love of vibrant colors, adding color to things that in real life are not colorful.
“I like colors a lot and color palettes,” Ta said. “Especially in the paintings, there’s a lot of arbitrary colors I made up myself.”
PSUC senior graduating with a BFA in graphic design photography Arnold Barretto has created a magazine called The Choreographed Zine. He funded it through Kickstarter, an online fundraising service, and curated works from PSUC students, as well as artists around the world.
On display, Barretto also has postcard-prints that are showcased on a large scale, each one with a man’s figure, addressing the stereotypes around gay men and how they are labeled for their body types.
He also has two photography sets on display. One is abstract, dealing with lighting and space, while the other addresses toxic masculinity. For the latter, he asked men to tell him a story of a time when toxic masculinity affected them and then photographed them doing the thing they had been told they couldn’t.
“I know the strength of my work and I know what I need to work on,” Barretto said. “Putting it up in the gallery [and] having people tell me how important my work is in some cases is really reassuring because sometimes I feel like my work might be a little too political. Maybe I need to explore other options while also doing political stuff, but having people tell me [my work] is really important is what art should be.”
The exhibition will be on display until May 17.
