CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — More than 100 seniors in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign will exhibit work that is the culmination of their education. The School of Art and Design Bachelor of Fine Arts Exhibition opens May 9, with an opening reception from 4-6 p.m., and runs through May 16 at Krannert Art Museum.
The exhibition shows work from students receiving bachelor of fine arts or bachelor of arts degrees in all disciplines of the school — art education, art history, graphic design, industrial design and studio art, which includes fashion, illustration, interdisciplinary practice, new media, painting, photography, printmaking and sculpture.
Graphic design students Rinnell Borges and Natalie Mora created the design theme for the catalog that accompanies the BFA Exhibition, as well as the style and branding for social media posts and vinyl window decals that promote the exhibition. The theme, “Myth of Originality,” refers to the idea of artists influencing one another while developing work that is uniquely their own.
Courtesy Rinnell Borges
Their design includes images drawn from the work of their fellow students and other artists shown on the walls of the Art and Design building; evidence of the creative process, such as wood shavings on a lab floor; textures found throughout the building; and historical images from the University Archives, including cyanotype prints and blueprints. Borges and Mora used a unique font called Blue Eyeshadow that is a mashup of various sans serif and script fonts, another nod to the exhibition theme.
Both students have their own work in the exhibition as well. Borges created a design concept for a syrup to be mixed into cocktails and coffees, including the design for the label and packaging and overall branding for the product. Mora created a booklet, poster and prints on strategies for navigating emotional conversations within Latino communities.
Caroline Dorion, a senior in studio art, has two large drawings of figures in the exhibition. She created a toned background by painting it with an ink wash, then used chalk and charcoal to draw headless female figures draped in flowing fabric.
Dorion said she was inspired by a semester spent studying abroad in Italy and seeing the art of the Renaissance, and she was interested in how the male gaze influenced the way in which female figures were portrayed in paintings from the period. Dorion said her drawings are studies of the body and the drapery, without faces and some body parts, and with poses that are seductive and revealing, as if the drapery were not there. She said she is interested in what body language can reveal.
“A lot can be said in one pose. An image can give you a whole backstory,” Dorion said.
Sylvie Leyerle is a graphic design student with a passion for painting and drawing. For her capstone project, she created a children’s book that tells the story of her adoption from China at the age of 13 months.
“I wanted to do something personal and something that included studio art illustration,” Leyerle said.
She loves portraiture and painting her family members for the book. She is especially proud of an illustration of parents with their newly adopted children, based on a photo taken in China.
The book uses floral imagery to “convey the idea that children are flowers and can be planted in many different places. It brings a more innocent, childlike aesthetic to the book,” Leyerle said.
She said she wants the book to be engaging for children and parents, while touching on the scary experience of moving to a different country to live with a new family. Leyerle said her book is something she’ll pass down to her children to share her adoption story.
Amber Mies is an industrial design student whose project addresses how parents can introduce technology to their children in a healthy way. She did extensive research through interviews with parents and teachers, observing children playing with toys at the U. of I.’s Child Development Laboratory and deconstructing a popular screen-free toy. Her goal was to develop a toy that allowed children to engage with technology, but that was screen-free, tactile and interactive, with an audio component.
“TinkerTunes” features cards that play music or stories and that light up a board with related images — letters, numbers or shapes for younger children and patterns for older children. Users place flexible rods with magnets on the board to match the lighted images.
“I learned a lot about the impact of toys, parenting and child development. When designing a product, the user is the main focus. Having this mindset increases your abilities to create a seamless experience between the user and your design,” Mies said.
Kiera Oliva-VanDeWalle is a fashion design student with an interest in sustainability. She enjoys using found or secondhand materials in her designs and working within the constraints of found materials. For example, she made a skirt from a yard of dark yellow floral fabric. Because she had a limited amount of material, she couldn’t cut it and instead used pintucks and pleats to shape it.
She has six outfits in the BFA exhibition, and she’ll also show them in Art and Design’s Re-Fashioned fashion show at 6:30 p.m. May 9 at the Siebel Center for Design. She said her creations are based on nostalgia and her “village” of family and friends. She was inspired by the toys and books she and her siblings played with as children. All the garments have a color scheme of purple and yellow — colors she associates with that time in her life — and they include patchwork, frayed edges, draping curves and asymmetry. In the exhibition, she’ll have photographs of models wearing the clothes, and the garments will be displayed on mannequins.
Bianca Olson is a photography student whose work explores themes of memories and relationships in a dreamy, idyllic way. Olson said she is interested in how photos become a visual signifier of a memory that can shift one’s perception of that memory.
“I would be experiencing something I was really enjoying, but I would have this weird feeling that I was going to forget it,” leading to her interest in photography, she said.
Many of her images in the exhibition were made in Sweden, where she’ll be moving after graduation. She took film images allowing light to leak through and others with images bleeding into one another. They reference sleep deprivation, hallucinations and dreams.
Her photographs also relate to getting to know a new place and creating her own associations with it, juxtaposed with photographs of her relationship to her home. Her work in the exhibition includes a large print of her childhood bedroom with her belongings and photos projected onto a wall.
Editor’s notes: For information about the School of Art and Design Bachelor of Fine Arts Exhibition, contact Luke Batten at lbatten@illinois.edu. For information about Krannert Art Museum, contact Evelyn Shapiro at esha@illinois.edu.
