By Helena Hunt, Staff Writer
Retrospectives typically look back on an entire career, gathering together the works that embody and encompass an artist’s career. The exhibit opening this week in the Martin Museum does the opposite, looking forward on three young Baylor artists’ careers.
Starting at 5:30 p.m. today, graduating studio art majors — Sugar Land senior Sofia Carrillo, Houston senior Allie Lovell and Houston senior Caroline Layne — will exhibit a selection of their best works in the Martin Museum’s gallery space.
Carrillo and Lovell will show a sampling of the posters, packages and other commercial materials that they have designed within and outside class over their last two years at Baylor. Layne, a painter, will show a collection of 50 miniature seascapes.
Because there are only three artists in this year’s show, as opposed to the usual ten or fifteen, viewers will get the chance to interact with each student’s pieces on a more personal level.
The exhibition comes at the end of a full semester in which these artists must assemble their final portfolios, apply for jobs and complete the class schedules of full-time art students. Nevertheless, they want the upcoming show, which runs from today until November 24th, to showcase the quality of the work they have produced at Baylor.
“I’m trying, even though we’re doing everything last minute, I’m still trying to make everything good and not look like it was rushed. Even if I was working on a super duper time crunch, I can still do quality work, and hopefully that shows,” Carrillo said.
For each of them, their work typifies what they have created at Baylor, and what they may go on to create throughout their careers. Layne’s seascapes, all of which she painted within the last month, come from a longstanding preoccupation with the beaches she visited during her childhood in Galveston and Florida. Now, she has turned those memories into abstracted images that she hopes will reach viewers’ own sense of the past.
“They’re kind of meant to be intimate memories from my childhood, and they’re supposed to represent the changing of the ocean,” Layne said. “The viewer is meant to be able to see it and project their own past memories or feelings onto them. I wanted to do a multitude of paintings, the fifty that are going to be in my show, that represent the changing of sea and ocean.”
Lovell and Carrillo will also feature their best works. Carrillo said that, since each design is determined by the client’s preferences, they cannot put together a cohesive show like Layne did. Instead, they composed artist’s statements on one piece instead of the whole collection to deconstruct their purposes and methods in the piece’s creation. Carrillo chose a mock-up poster she designed for the Olympics, and Lovell selected a package design for a craft soda, Zing King.
Each artist said they believe the show reflects their growth at Baylor and encapsulates their budding careers.
“I definitely think that it shows how much we’ve grown as designers. But it was definitely hard to choose just ten pieces to show, since we’ve done so much in our classes. It shows what we’re good at as designers, but it still doesn’t show [everything],” Lovell said. “I’m pleased with it, but I still feel I can do so much better.”
