Seniors Showcase Art ‘EXPEERIENCE’

Published April 24 at 5:21 p.m. by Rachel E. Dewey.

A trio of seniors are presenting their final art projects – a closer look at their personal journeys – in an exhibit on display April 29-May 24 at Keuka College’s Lightner Gallery.

The Senior Art Show showcases the talents of Erik Holmes of Penn Yan, Courtney French (Massena), and Erica Ruscio (Middlesex). An artists’ reception will be held from 4:30-6 p.m. Tuesday, April 30 at the gallery in Lightner Library. Light refreshments will be served and the event is free and open to the public. The exhibit runs through May 24.The gallery is open during Lightner Library hours, whichcan be found online at: http://lightner.keuka.edu.

According to Melissa Newcomb, assistant professor of art and adviser to the student artists, each one had to prepare an artist’s statement, along with a “thesis” of sorts, representing the culmination of work produced over their time as a student. Throughout this semester, they met  weekly for senior art seminar, she said, and from those talks, a group consensus emerged: everybody’s grown.

This group has some of the strongest raw talent of students Newcomb has mentored during her four years at Keuka, she said.

According to Ruscio, the trio named the exhibit “EXPEERIENCE” because it’s “all about our experiences and we hope that people can see that by peering a little closer.”

“There are also a lot of eyes and faces, so we just thought it was a catchy title,” Ruscio added. (more…)

A Mix of Many Talents

Published March 19 at 3:16 p.m. by Rachel E. Dewey.

Prismacolor butterflies. Black and white typography. Cupcakes and dandelions, in triplicate.  Colored-pencil portraits. A powerful pink-and-orange sunset. A ship sailing off on a sea of cotton.

These are some of the works featured in the Keuka College student art show, running through April 18 in the Lightner Gallery, with additional works on display on the fourth floor of Hegeman Hall.

The gallery, located in Lightner Library, is open during regular library hours, which vary during the academic semester, but can be found online at: http://library.keuka.edu

The exhibit will  featured  drawings, paintings, sculpture, mixed media, and photography from the hands of freshmen, sophomores, and juniors, as well as a few seniors who are non-art majors.

Senior Ashley Larimore and others enrolled in the new graphic design course offered this spring have debuted typography collections in the show. Larimore said that although she does not major in art, she loves drawing and painting, and “couldn’t wait” to add the new course to her schedule so that she could build more design skills working with Adobe software.

“The experience I gained working in Adobe Illustrator after the first project is incredible. I’ve really enjoyed overcoming the challenge of creating art through a screen using a mouse, rather than my hands,” Larimore said. “Every time I see my finished product, I have to remind myself it’s my work.”

According to Melissa Newcomb, assistant professor of art, the submissions for this student show are “the best yet” in  her four years teaching  at Keuka.

“I say every time, ‘It’s the best show yet,’ and it seems to get better every year,” Newcomb said. “The quality is just great.”

The majority of pieces surround drawing and photography works from the Drawing I & II and digital photography courses held in the fall. In addition, works from last spring’s Painting I course, and mixed media pieces from a general-education course, Foundations of Art and Design, as well as  Sculpture I & II, which were both offered this spring, appear in the show.

Junior Stephanie Collins, an occupational therapy major, said she could relate a lot of the material she learned in art education class to art therapy. The show features a series of colorful butterflies Collins created using colored pencils.

“I’ve never really used them for a project before so it was really cool to see how bright I could get the colors,” Collins said. “This class lets me explore different materials like crayons and colored pencils that I wouldn’t be able to use on other projects. It teaches me how to incorporate art into things I never would have thought of before.”

According to Collins, the student works in the show tell her a key point about Keuka: “I am impressed with all of the talent at the school!”

The student show will be followed by Keuka’s senior show, which will feature capstone works from six seniors majoring in visual and verbal arts.

 

 

Beyond 9 – 5

Published Feb. 8 at 5:42 p.m. by Rachel E. Dewey.

By day, Penn Yan resident Carol Sackett manages the circulation desk at Lightner Library, a post she has held for 32 years. But through March 7, visitors to Keuka College can glimpse a different side of her, as seen in three oil paintings gracing the walls of Lightner Gallery.

Sackett’s paintings are on display alongside numerous other works from members of Keuka’s faculty and staff, whose job titles may not necessarily disclose the individuals as creative “artists-in-residence.”

Beyond 9 to 5: The Hidden Talents of Keuka’s Faculty and Staff runs through March 7 in Lightner Gallery,located in Lightner Library. It features  a range of artistic mediums, including painting, photography, ceramics, glass work, digital art, and film.  More than 20 faculty and staff members submitted work for the show, including President Jorge L. Díaz-Herrera.

During a special artists’ reception – open to the public – Thursday, Feb. 21 from 4:30 – 6 p.m., the exhibit will also feature select culinary art from four members of the faculty and staff. The exhibit remains open daily during library hours, available online at: http://lightner.keuka.edu

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Blink and (Don’t) Miss It

Published Nov. 21, 2012 at 2:50 p.m. by Rachel E. Dewey.

Like many artists, Kurt Bownell has to balance the commercial with the personal.

The Victor resident is a commercial photographer with a Rochester studio and a client list that includes such corporations as Wegmans, Constellation Brands, Democrat and Chronicle, Unity Health and several universities. The clients commission Brownell for everything from beauty shots of growers, produce and culinary arts to corporate executives in their workplace environments.

His day job keeps him so busy that his personal photographic love – outdoor landscapes – often happens on the fly, such as when he snapped shots of the rolling hills of Cohocton on a pit stop as his family returned from a vacation.

Perhaps that’s why Brownell’s new exhibit at Keuka College, “Up Close and Far Away-Landscapes,” is such a treat for him. The exhibit runs through Jan. 4^, with an artist reception Thursday, Nov. 29 from 4:30 – 6 p.m. at Lightner Gallery inside Lightner Library. The exhibit is open to the public; library hours vary and can be found online at: http://lightner.keuka.edu.

“This is what I like to do when I’m not being told what to photograph,” he said. “This is what I gravitate toward naturally. I can go without any agenda and shoot what I feel, what I like, what I find.”

Many of his images, which he refers to as “interpretive landscapes,” are “stitched” composites of 10-20 different shots, melded together to create one final, full panorama for the viewer.

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Chemists Gather at Keuka

Published Oct. 3, 2012 at 2:36 p.m. by Rachel E. Dewey.

Some 26 members of the Corning Section of the American Chemical Society attended a dinner and lecture in Lightner Library Sept. 25 on “The Art of Chemistry,” the current exhibit in Lightner Gallery featuring color photographs of chemical experiments.

It was the first time Keuka College has hosted a monthly meeting of the local chapter of the organization.

According to Tom Carroll, professor of chemistry, the Corning Section of the American Chemical Society membership includes representatives from a number of colleges and industrial companies. They meet monthly and give special awards given to outstanding college seniors each April. Last spring, Carroll was asked to host a monthly meeting this fall at Keuka, and the new exhibit became an ideal presentation.

The exhibit showcases the work of junior Kat Andonucci, who photographed experiments she conducted as a year-long independent study with Dr. Andy Robak, associate professor of chemistry. Robak has described himself as having “wacky interests” that combine artistic pursuits including photography, sculpture and painting with scientific study. He sought out a student in Keuka’s visual and verbal art program to help carry out the vision and found Andonucci, who had originally enrolled in Keuka as a biology major.

Robak served as keynote speaker for the meeting, which included time for members to peruse the photography in the gallery, enjoy a catered dinner and hear details of the experiments and exhibit in a discussion facilitated by Robak. In addition to the American Chemical Society, the Andonucci and Robak’s work has drawn the attention of Chemical & Engineering News in Washington, D.C., which published a story on the exhibit in its Oct. 1 issue and website.

According to Carroll, Keuka’s chemistry professors have been keeping busy in recent weeks. Carroll was an invited speaker at the special ICESS 2012 pre-conference workshop held at the SOLEIL Synchrotron south of Paris, France between Sept. 14 – 16.  The workshop was in honor of Prof. T. D. Thomas (Oregon State University), with whom Carroll has done research since 1972.  The workshop commemorated Dr. Thomas’s 80th birthday, and his nearly 50 years of research in the field of electron spectroscopy.

Carroll also reported that Division Chair Mike Keck is attending the Rochester meeting of the American Chemical Society this week.

Students Perpetuate UFO Hoax for Learning’s Sake

Published Sept. 26, 2012 at 2:09 p.m. by Doug Lippincott.

By John Locke, director of instructional design and multidisciplinary studies

Is Keuka Park the new Roswell?

Judging from photographs taken by students in CMP 265: Computer Visual Design, one might come to that conclusion.

Unidentified flying objects (UFOs) were photographed hovering over Point Neamo, outside residence halls, and various other locales on campus. However, panic has not set in. In fact, students, faculty and staff have been going about their daily routines and paying no attention to the strange objects flying overhead.

That’s because these are photographic “hoaxes” that students created using Photoshop. Call it a high-tech spinoff of the 1938 radio drama based on H.G. Well’s “War of the Worlds,” sans the hysteria but with much more educational value.

“I try to get my students out of the textbook and into a project as soon as possible, so that they can apply what they’ve learned so far,” said Instructor John Locke. “We are all aware that Photoshop can be used for nefarious purposes, so I figure we might as well get it out of our systems early on in the class.”

“I think the UFO project was really fun… we got to put a twist on college life at Keuka and spruce up the campus,” said Maddie Reynolds, a senior educational studies major.

Her photo depicts an odd-shaped spacecraft hovering outside her residence hall while a student points in astonishment at an extraterrestrial who is throwing a soccer ball out of a second-floor window.

As their homework assignment, students photographed the scenes where their UFO “sightings” would be staged, and then they took pictures of everyday, common items to use as their “UFOs.” Back in the classroom, they worked in Photoshop to create a composite of their assorted images.

“It was a great introductory project for us to apply basic skills we have been learning in Photoshop,” said John Miller, a senior organizational communication major.

Miller’s photo shows his friends speeding along in a boat with a flying saucer hot on its stern.

“I showed the photo I edited to my friends that were in it. In disbelief they kept saying, ‘What is that?’ until I explained that I had created the UFO myself,” said Miller.

Locke said “more strangeness can be expected” from his students.

“They have been morphing each other’s facial features onto their own portraits to create an army of CMP 265 Mutants,” he explained. “Every time another mutant is ‘born’ and presented, the class breaks out in laughter. Combining facial features is not a skill they will probably ever use in a practical sense, but in the process, they are becoming pretty competent photo retouch artists.”

Last year around Halloween, students created a collection of horror movie posters that hung in the hallway near the Geiser Refectory. Locke plans to resurrect that project this season, and hopes to display another crop of petrifying posters produced in Photoshop.

View all of the UFO photos.

Lights, Camera – Science!

Published Sept. 3, 2012 at 9:39 a.m. by Rachel E. Dewey.

Start with a science lab. Add one chemistry professor with self-described “wacky interests.” Introduce a visual and verbal art major once obsessed with rocks, especially the minerals that glow under ultraviolet light. Mix up a variety of chemistry experiments under special lights and have the student capture them on camera. What do you get?

The Art of Chemistry, a year-long discovery in pictures of the beauty and form caused –and  sometimes concocted – with a variety of chemical compounds. The art exhibit runs through Sept. 28 in Lightner Gallery inside Lightner Library at Keuka College, where an artist reception will be held from 4:30 – 6 p.m. Thursday, September 20. The gallery is open daily; hours can be found on the main page at: http://lightner.keuka.edu

Student photographer Kat Andonucci, a junior from Chestertown, near the Lake George region, did a year-long independent study under the guidance of Andy Robak, associate professor of chemistry. With Robak casting the vision and directing her in each experiment, Andonucci crafted the composition, often using a tripod, a remote shutter and a long exposure to create the images. For example, one image of Robak pouring a luminol solution into a narrow-mouth beaker required the shutter remain open for 15 seconds or more to showcase the intense blues and greens of the liquid.

“Everything we did had to be something visually appealing,” explained Andonucci, describing how the independent study served as her chemistry class for the year.

“I’ve owned my camera since ninth grade, and as a side hobby, I did landscapes and outdoor pictures,” Andonucci said, explaining how she entered college as a biology major, thinking she would pursue a career in forensic pathology. But a film photography course in her first semester got her thinking her high school hobby might turn out to be more than just something to do on the side. So she switched her major to visual and verbal art.

Enter Robak, who contacted Melissa Newcomb, assistant professor of art, last year in search of a student who could help illustrate experiments that would show “the fun side of chemistry.”

“I’ve always been interested in chemistry as art or science as art. You can see from the pictures that a lot of stuff I work with is really cool,” said Robak, who holds a Ph.D. in organic chemistry. He rattled off a variety of compounds, from mercury, with its shiny metallic texture that is “really fun to play with,” to flourescein, which turns neon-green when in contact with water, to glycerol, which refracts light in a way that seems to make objects submersed in it disappear. Images of each of those chemicals appear in the exhibit.

“We wanted to treat as a course, the chemistry of things that are neat to look at, to have a clue what they were,” Robak said, pointing out how many science textbooks use photography to illustrate experiments. The two received a $500 grant from Keuka’s Division of Academic Affairs to help cover costs of printing and framing the images.

For her part, Andonucci said she was “excited and nervous” because shooting under such unusual conditions was outside of her comfort zone with natural, outdoor lighting. Indeed, lighting was the biggest challenge as she would sometimes use a window, a lamp, black lights, or would incorporate the light generated from a chemical itself in different images.

A secondary challenge was the blink-and-miss-it nature of some of the experiments, such as a shot of flames from methane gas bubbles leaping upward from the hand of Erik Holmes, a senior visual and verbal art major.

Andonucci had to be sure to take several shots of each experiment, capturing several on camera by conducting experiments several times in a row. For another image, Robak directed her to bring glycerol, a liquid, into contact with purple potassium permanganate, a solid, which bursts into purple flames and smoke without any introduction of heat, he said.

“Kat worked on that one for a long time. She tried about 20 times and probably took 150 photographs of the same thing in order to get it right,” Robak said. It’s a good thing she shot in digital, because she kept filling up the camera’s memory card every time, he added.

“More than anything, I think she had a really good eye for these sorts of things. She takes a great picture, but out of many, many pictures that she got, she was great at picking out the right ones,” Robak said.

After a year of translating her chemistry class into images, Andonucci said she would be willing to work with Robak again on similar projects. She is considering posting her images online to see if she could market them to companies for commercial use.

“There’s so much you can do with forensic photography,” she said, adding that she’s “pretty open to anything [with photography], as long as it’s not taking pictures of people.”

Robak managed to convince Holmes to paint a graffiti mural on a concrete wall last year.  The mural illustrated the chemical structure of concrete itself, and Robak said he has ideas for other special projects involving science and other types of art, whether sculpture, painting or more.

“I’ve got too many ideas and not enough artists,” Robak said. “I’m totally looking for more people to rope into these kinds of things.”

Summing up her year-long experiment and the exhibit, Andonucci said “it’s awesome, it’s pretty and it’s cool. I had fun and learned a ton.”

Snapshot of a Graduate: Nicole Groth

Published July 24, 2012 at 8:30 a.m. by Rachel E. Dewey.

Where can a Keuka degree take you? This is the third in a series of snapshot profiles on members of Keuka’s Class of 2012.

Nicole Groth ’12 graduated cum laude with a degree in visual and verbal art and conducted three Keuka Field Period internships in Cornelius, N.C., where she is now living and working.

Her first Field Period internship, in January 2010, was at the Cornelius, N.C. animal shelter. Groth’s own rescue dog, Jazi, adopted when she was a senior in high school, melted her heart for other animals in the same plight, so the Field Period was a natural fit for her passion. Over spring break in her senior year of college, she returned to the North Carolina facility and shot black and white film photographs of the shelter dogs playing before breakfast. The images ultimately became part of her senior art project, a life-size metal cage with black and white photos of shelter dogs on the inside and full-color paintings of dogs rescued and adopted into homes on the outside.

While she continues to volunteer Sunday mornings feeding and walking the animals, marketing the facility, and attending adoption events, the two internships she conducted in summer 2011 and January 2012 at the nearby Cornelius Arts Center, turned into paid positions. The arts building is home to the non-profit Community Arts Project, where Groth now teaches art classes, workshops, classes for adults, and summer camp courses.

In addition, Groth also works as a recreations program assistant for the Town of Cornelius Parks, Arts, Recreation and Culture department, housed in the same building. Work there includes registering students for classes, completing reports, and running the front desk.

In the meantime, she has applied to show her artwork next spring in the Cornelius Arts Center Gallery, which attracts many local artists. She has also applied for entry to an October arts festival.

Amidst starting a new chapter of life, Groth said she misses the Keuka campus, where among her many learning experiences were responsibilities as a resident assistant.

“I have used the skills I gained through those [R.A.] experiences so much since graduation, and am grateful for those opportunities,” she said.

To explore what might be in your future with a Keuka degree, request more information.

Seniors Make Artistic Statements in Show

Published May 3, 2012 at 7:56 p.m. by Rachel E. Dewey.

Red, black and white clothing designs fashioned out of more recycled goods than just fabric. A giant animal cage adorned with photos and paintings of rescue dogs, with a door allowing a person to step inside. A bronzed sculpture of a hawk, wings stretched out before it takes flight.

All three art projects are the work of a trio of graduating seniors at Keuka College and can be seen as part of the student art show, which runs through May 30 in Lightner Gallery, and also features additional works by underclassmen.  And all three seniors are clear that their respective artwork makes a statement they want others to “hear.”

With her collection of red, black and white dresses, Crystal Cochell of Trumansburg is protesting in color and form the waste she observes in the environments around her, especially corporations. Nicole Groth of Henrietta showcases her work with humane societies through black and white photos of puppies playing in the yard of an animal shelter and color paintings of dogs adopted into families she knows, including her own. And Stephanie Lange of Apalachin is eager to invite interaction from the public — students, faculty and visiting community members — with the bronze installation she hopes might become the first of several sculptures to adorn the campus. (more…)

A Study in Black and White

Published April 4, 2012 at 9:30 a.m. by Rachel E. Dewey.

She may be concentrating in bio-medical courses, but it’s her photography that caught the eye of judges in the 32^nd Annual College & High School Photography contest.

Junior Samantha Swearingen recently learned that her black-and-white image of corn stalks was selected as a finalist in a competition that drew 17,700 entries from students across the U.S. and Canada. The contest, sponsored by camera maker Nikon USA, is a tradition for Photographer’s Forum magazine and winning images will appear in the May/Summer 2012 issue. All photographs ranked in first through fourth place in both the high school and college categories will also appear in the hardcover book, Best of College &High School Photography 2012, which will be published in June.

The Horseheads resident captured her image on a 35mm camera as part of an assignment for the film photography class she took last fall from Melissa Newcomb, assistant professor of art.

“The photo itself is kind of a freak thing,” Swearingen said, explaining that she was driving home from campus one weekend, trying to come up with ideas for the “texture” assignment for the class. “It was in the afternoon, not a very sunny day. I saw corn stalks leaning against the side of a building, so I just decided to pull over and take a picture.”

As fate would have it, Newcomb mentioned the photo contest and handed out informational flyers at the next class.

“It was pretty close to the deadline, but I figured I might as well try to submit something. So I went back through the [images] I’d done at that point and submitted three photos,” she said. “When I found out I was a finalist, it wasn’t the picture I expected out of the three, but I thought ‘Wow, I’ll take it.’” (more…)