By Elizabeth Fitzpatrick
Outgoing Features Editor
On April 17, four senior studio art majors, Erin Helgerman, Ella Jendrek, Rosi Garcia-Mendoza, and Rebekah Naomi McCreary Salazar, debuted their SCE exhibition in the Kohl Gallery.
The four unanimously chose the title “periphery” for their exhibition, based on their shared themes of marginalization and subjects who are on the fringes of society and the world.
Helgerman’s work, which deconstructs and repurposes technology, explores where mass-produced, daily-use items end up when people are finished with them.
“One of the main themes that we were exploring was marginalized communities, and though [my work] is not directly talking about a specific community, it’s more like society as a whole…the discarded technological pieces that are just thrown away and not thought about anymore and their journey,” Helgerman said.
Helgerman collected obsolete pieces of technology with the assistance of her friends and family, and ripped them apart to reform into her artwork. She took inspiration from music, her recent travels to Austria and Cuba, and her worldview as a sociology double major.
“My [Sociology SCE] topic is the impact of prison-based dog programs on incarcerated populations. [The projects are] very different, but I think how I live my day-to-day I look at everything through a sociologist kind of lens and that is reflected in my art,” Helgerman said.
Jendrek’s art was guided by themes of fear, curiosity, wonder, and, most importantly, exploration. The back left corner of the gallery transformed into a deep-sea environment.
She took inspiration from her biology SCE, which is also focused on the deep sea, sharing her enthusiasm for the subject by labeling her paintings with notebook paper filled with sea creature facts.
“As I was making these creatures I couldn’t just ignore all of the fun facts that I know about them,” Jendrek said. “I really leaned into the bio…I modeled the [labels] after my own zoology notes. I also put a lot of the studies that I did to see how I wanted to orient the final painting.”
Jendrek’s work not only used exploration as a theme, but was also exploratory when it came to medium. She combined her favorite medium, acrylic paint, with many other mediums, including modeling paste, stained glass, and watercolor.
“I tried stained glass. I tried combinations. I hate, hate, hate working big…way out of my comfort zone, but you know what? I went for it anyway,” Jendrek said.
Garcia-Mendoza and McCreary Salazar both drew from their own cultural backgrounds for the themes of their works.
“We planned our work separately but just being able to see each other as we developed was cool,” McCreary Salazar said. “I think when one of us got stuck the other was able to help them out.”
Garcia-Mendoza focused on how colonization affected religion and community in Latin American culture. Their mixed media work repurposes and transforms Catholic imagery, such as the rosary, into something new.
“I was trying to poke fun on the traditional idea of rosaries because some of these are made with beads that you would not see on a traditional rosary or sizes that would not be the norm,” Garcia Mendoza said, “so I’m playing with what is allowed and what’s not.”
As a dual-concentration Art and Art History major, Garcia-Mendoza researched the political use of the Mexican Virgin of Guadalupe imagery for their art history capstone. They incorporated the Virgin of Guadalupe into their own artwork as well, as well as aspects of other Latin American religious practices.
“A lot of these works have a mix of [Catholicism and] Aztec spirituality—but not just Aztec. I did rely a lot on Aztec history because that’s what we have the most record of,” Garcia Mendoza said. “I wanted to do something more of my home country, [El Salvador], my family’s home country, but there’s not a lot of information on those indigenous groups.”
McCreary Salazar’s work explored how national and racial identities function in a domestic space, with a particular focus on intergenerational homes and mixed-race identity.
“I grew up in an over 90% white community, very separated from anyone who was of any other race, but I think that the American experience is one of a very mixed and a very diverse experience and so I wanted to explore that,” McCreary Salazar said.
One of her paintings depicts four generations of the women in her family, and a still in-progress quilt reflects a quilt that her own grandmother had made for her when she was a child.
“Painting is my favorite, but I really, really enjoyed working with fabric. I find it really meditative and there’s a lot more tactility,” McCreary Salazar said. “I like that [other people], not just myself, will be interacting with [the quilt]—that it’s something that people can feel when I’m done with it. It’s something that’s more direct.”
Despite the four students’ wide range of subjects, the pieces beautifully complement each other in the space.
“It was great problem-solving with everybody,” Helgerman said. “It was really great bouncing ideas off of each other in terms of how to utilize the space.”
“periphery” will be on view in Kohl Gallery until May 2.
Photo Caption: Senior Roselyn Garcia-Mendoza speaks about their artwork at the gallery opening.
Photo courtesy of Rosi Garcia-Mendoza