The graduating students of the UVU BFA art and design program put on a wonderful exhibition of their work in the 6th floor gallery of the Gunther Technology building. Four students featured their work.
Taryn Birrer’s work was entitled “A Bodies Image.” They were photographs of landscapes with the outlines of different body parts underlined beneath the primary image. The stated objective of this piece was to “juxtapose a landscape that is generally thought of as beautiful with body parts of an individual that they specifically do not like.”
Doing another photography project, Michelle Johnson chose to focus on the desert places she calls home, from El Paso, Texas, to Provo and Lindon, Utah. Her work, called “The Lovely Desert,” sought to expose the variety in the desert that people often overlook.
Hannah Brown Anderton’s mixed media paintings explore the complex relationship she has with her femininity, having grown up in a place that holds traditional ideas of what that should look like. Entitled “Elucidate,” she sought to explore her own identity and in so doing hoped to uncover something within the viewer of her work.
The last of these graduating students was MaiLyn Millward, who crafted paper sculptures of various birds surrounding a tree. Her work was called “Not One of Us.” Her choice of using birds as her subject was to illustrate a sense of othering because, as stated on the plaque next to her work, “people are interested in observing birds but abstain from connecting or interacting with them.” Furthermore, her sculptures were hybrids of birds one would see in the wild, creating something both familiar and alien.
Intentionally or not, there was an amazing thematic connection between the artists exploring identity and beauty being found in the underappreciated. Not only were they each accomplished in their own right, but the combined effort of these students illustrated that great artists are coming out of UVU.
