Julio Fine Art Gallery Event: Senior Projects

Part of Thread For Thought By Elena Damon

On Friday, I attended the Julio Fine Art Gallery event where the Loyola seniors displayed their projects. The exhibition had interesting and beautiful pieces, but two particular pieces really stood out to me. The first being Thread for Thought by Elena Damon. In her description of the piece, Elena discusses how people's outward appearances do not necessarily portray their emotions and thought processes. Personally, I am very interested in people's thoughts and feelings that they do not express, which added to my interest in this piece. In each portrait Elena added the embroidery to represent the individual's inner thoughts and consciousness. The shape of the embroidered string gives each portrait an aura that appears to the viewer as their mind working. I especially liked how Elena made the people black and white, but the string colored. The strong contrast in colors made the difference in their outward appearance and inner self stand out more. In addition, having their inner consciousness colored exemplifies the idea that the neutral look an individual may have is not necessarily indicative of their actual thoughts and feelings.
The second piece that stood out to me was a series of paintings titled White Noise by Maggie Powell expressing different people's reactions to the same piece of music. In her description of her piece Maggie discusses the unique effect music has on each person who experiences it. In creating this piece, Maggie observed and photographed different individuals listening to the same music. Then she created a series of paintings one being pictured below. In addition, as part her exhibit Maggie provided the qr code to play music. The painting pictured below stood out the most to me because Maggie perfectly captured the man's response to hearing the music. His facial expression is complex and effective at conveying emotion. In addition, by having his gaze averted it makes the viewer feel like they are witnessing a private moment of him hearing the music. Though these two pieces stood out to me the most, all of the senior projects were a range of interesting styles and very unique pieces.

Part of White Noise Series by Maggie Powell