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The Broadside

The Student News Site of Central Oregon Community College

The Broadside

The Student News Site of Central Oregon Community College

The Broadside

Promoting art on campus: faculty exhibition showcases work in unexpected places

Photo+by+Katya+Agatucci
Photo by Katya Agatucci

By Katya Agatucci | The Broadside (Contact: [email protected])

The upper campus of Central Oregon Community College was lucky enough to display an art walk featuring the art instructors on campus on Nov. 16. Bill Hoppe, director of the art program at COCC, put the show together and guided the art walk.

“It’s such a great honor to be apart of this faculty and work with you all. I applaud you [the faculty],” Hoppe said at the end of the art walk.

The art walk started at the second floor of Grandview and went to the Ochoco faculty hall ways and the second story display cases, the Modoc common area, the Metolius hallways, and the bottom floor of the Science building.

There are series of two-dimensional and three-dimensional pieces that were displayed across the campus from collaborative pieces to interactive pieces involving money.

Attendees of the art walk met in the Pence building to walk together. Each faculty member featured for their hard work and dedication will be up for display until Dec. 15.


Grandview Lobby

Bill Cravis & Paula Bullwinkel   |   Ceramic sculpture and paintings

A collection of collaborative ceramic pieces done by Bill Cravis and Paula Bullwinkel, centered around the idea of the seven deadly sins balanced by the seven heavenly virtues.

The seven were not finished, but each of the five pieces done has the opposite virtue and sin on the other side of the ceramic piece.

“The most fun sin was rath which was the snarling dog,” Bullwinkel said.

The ceramic pieces are all placed in front of oil paintings that Bullwinkel made, which are usually based off of photographs of her daughter that she took. She would also research Japanese culture from the 80s and 90s to include in her paintings as well.

“There’s often a male figure with a weapon in it, which indicated my concerns. There’s a certain anxiety in the paintings, but balanced by a feeling like it’s going to be okay. There’s joy and celebration,” Bullwinkel said.

Some of the paintings are directly created from photographs that she took with her daughters wearing animal masks.

For Bullwinkel’s future work, “I think I’m going to be doing more animals this time around, I really like animals and I think I might get more people responding better to animals.”


Ochoco Walls

Jason Lamb & Bill Hoppe   |   Digital illustration and prints

In the halls of the faculty offices in the Humanities department, Jason Lamb’s digital illustrations were displayed on the walls.

Lamb was involved with an independent video game company, working on a two-dimensional class-style adventure game.

“Me and two or three other artist pretty much did all of the background paintings. These are all the environments where characters can interact with other things in the screen,” Lamb said.

Out of the 200 backgrounds made for the video game, Lamb made about 60, which take around eight to twelve hours to made per background. He also did a lot of the animation in the game.

The video game is called “Quest for Infamy.” All of the digital illustrations were created in Photoshop and this program called Gimp, which is GNU Image Manipulation Program, a freeware open source version of Photoshop

“It’s a lot like drawing and coloring with markers, except that you have a lot more freedom, no mess, and you can do a lot more with it,” Lamb explained.

His inspiration came from a variety of sources, from The Lord of The Rings to John Constable and English landscape paintings.

  • Bill Hoppe: A Love Affair

Bill Hoppe, art director at Central Oregon Community College, created a collection of prints centered around an old romance.

“It started in the 80s. When my daughter was a junior in college and an old girlfriend from Seattle came to visit. We found that we were right back in the 80s again. I collected a shoebox full of postcards from Europe, and I started sending her postcards everyday.”

A monoprint titled Foxtail Bridge is a print of a bridge-like structure. It’s inspired from when his old girlfriend would call him when she would cross a certain bridge where they had history, so he made a piece illustrating that in his piece.

“I started doing a series of works from the flowers in my backyard and sort of like a metaphor for the development of this courtship. When she would visit, she would point out something that she liked and I would try to include it [in the pieces],”Hoppe explained.

The prints were done at A6, creating a monotype print and color was added to it after.

Hoppe told his intimate story and how it affected his pieces that he created for the showing.


Ochoco Display Cases

Moe Carolin & Peter Meyer   |   Ceramics

The display cases on the second story of Ochoco were filled with ceramic pieces made by Moe Carolin and Peter Meyer. Carloin made tall raku pieces and Meyer had a timeline of pieces dating back to 1974.

Meyer was not able to attend due to an annual show he was attending in Medford. His pieces included many types of work and a glossary for terms that he uses in his titles.

Carolin was not able to attend the show either, her vision for her pieces were black and white raku pieces with handles made of branches that were wired into the pottery.

The textured glaze in one of his cup pieces are made from marble from the First National Bank in Portland. The marble was ground up and painted onto the cup. During the firing process, it crawls back and creates the textured beading.


Modoc Money Talks

Sam Fisch   |   2D and 3D installation

Sam Fisch created a number of interactive two-dimensional and three-dimensional pieces in the Modoc building common room. The pieces were used of real dollar bills and copies of counterfeit bills and receipts that he saved from his trip around the country.

These pieces were created into an interactive piece where viewers could take bills off of the piece, and thought and conversation bubbles made out of receipts and bills.

“It’s a number of pieces in conversation with one another. This work is an iteration of a project that I’ve been doing for some time, working with money and energy structures. Just thinking about different forms of energy in different ways and our relationship to it,” Fisch explained.

When the faculty show was up in the air, Fisch wanted to use the Modoc building from the start to interact with the flags, the open space, and the map.

“I wanted to utilize this environment to kind of bring the conversation to more of a global scale and thinking about our relationship, not just individually or nationally, but also globally,” Fisch said.

His pieces were not traditional in the sense that “The language of materiality that I’m employing here is fairly contemporary and it might not be the most readily expected materials to see. I’m trying to engage people in a more contemporary way and trying to expose people to some thoughts about themselves and the world that they are living in with contemporary pieces and forms of energy.”

The pieces were displayed to keep them relevant and connect the pieces to the audience. The idea behind the project was site specific work, and the idea behind the pieces came together in collaboration with the space that was used.

“There’s a time based nature to a lot of this work. What is the value of this as a dollar and what is the value of this as a piece of art? Something that can appreciate in value as opposed to something that is subject to inflation and depreciation,” Fisch said.


Metolius

Ian Factor   |   Paintings and Drawings

Ian Factor’s collection of artwork in the Metolius building is a series of works spanning from his arrival in Bend with a portrait of Bill Cravis to a self portrait that was made in New York when he was in graduate school.

There is also a series of oil paintings that employ movement and business within the pieces that were made from observation, “In grad school I started to get into trying to describe a kinetic movement in a painting and trying not to do it within the language of photography and blurred movement, but how does one see or memorize movement. Not just physical movement, but the movement of time.”

The series of paintings were done in Union Square on site, where the pieces change from composition in figuration, to specificity of figuration and then the specificity of movement, the palette, and atmosphere.

There are also charcoal pieces from when Factor was teaching in China, where he created portraits of his art students that he was working with.

In those pieces, there was a use of movement with the charcoal that was done by using denatured alcohol and acetone. As soon as the alcohol hits the paper, it evaporates and turns back into charcoal as soon as it hits the paper.

At the moment, Factor is working on some new pieces, but is not displaying them yet because he doesn’t want to unveil them before they are ready.


Science Center

Carolyn Platt   |   Palipsest

Karen Ellis   |   Printmaking

  • Karen Ellis

Karen Ellis created a series of intimate pieces that were meant to be observed upclose to understand them that were displayed in the halls of the Science building side by side.

The series of several square paintings illustrated quotes, anatomy, and plants with hidden layers and quotes.

“They’re like pages of a mysterious notebook, based on nature. They’re built in layers. They’re not just one, they’re built up with different mysterious messages,” Ellis explained.

The pieces are centered around the relationship between anatomy, botany and about quotes and healing.

“It’s also about the mysteries of nature. They’re meant to be like pages in a book,” Ellis said.

  • Carolyn Platt

Carolynn Platt’s series of monotypes and lithographs were also displayed on the bottom floor of the science center. A series of two monotypes and lithographs next to each other.

The monotypes were made with a sheet of plexi glass and color was added to it. The lithographs that were created were made in the crow shadow printmaking studio in the Umatilla Indian Reservation, according to Platt.

She was able to work with a couple of famous printmakers because of the Round House Foundation Residency.

“Learning that process, the sound of rolling the ink, the smell of the ink, it was really wonderful,” Platt said about the printmaking studio.

Within the creation of her pieces, she explained that she isn’t influenced from anyone specific,  “I don’t intentionally try to [be influenced] by anyone, but they are always in my head.” ■

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