 Okay, let's go ahead and get started. Hi everyone and thank you so much for joining us tonight. I am Kristen Smith, the gallery coordinator for the Center for Visual Art, the off-campus gallery for the Metropolitan State University of Denver. Thank you so much for joining us this evening for our virtual artist talk for the MSU Denver Student Exhibition, Spring 2021. Please mute your microphone and turn off your cameras to reduce distractions. I would like to begin tonight's event with an acknowledgement of the land that we live and thrive on. As part of the MSU Denver Art Department, we acknowledge the privilege we have today to gather in this place, Auraria campus. Once the territories and homelands of so many Indigenous peoples, including the Arapaho and Cheyenne nations, both of whom were subject to genocide and forcibly removed from this land, we acknowledge that the establishment of our campus further dismantled the culture, community, and tradition of this place through the displacement of Chicano people who lived and worked in the Auraria neighborhood. By knowing this history, we can better understand our place within it and seek to be in right relationship with the people who were here before us and are here now. We are fortunate to call Auraria campus and MSU Denver a place of learning and inclusion. We respect the many diverse Indigenous peoples still connected to this land and value the sophisticated and intricate knowledge systems they have developed in relationship to their lands. We collectively understand that offering a land acknowledgement either absolves settler colonial privilege nor diminishes colonial structures of violence at either the individual or institutional level. Land acknowledgements must be preceded and followed with ongoing and unwavering commitments to displaced Indigenous and immigrant communities. In order to learn more about the spatial relationships of Indigenous communities to lands both locally and across the globe, we recommend visiting native-land.ca and exploring the interactive map. There are also many ways to support Indigenous people today, including through local organizations such as the Denver Indian Center and Denver Indian Family Resource Center. Thank you. This evening we will hear from five artists, all of whom are represented in our current MSU Denver student exhibition. I'll give you a little background on how this show came to be. BFA thesis exhibitions are typically held in person at the CVA every spring and fall semester. However, due to COVID restrictions, the false 2020 and spring 2021 BFA thesis shows were moved to an online only exhibition as a requirement of the program. As a result, we offer the students the opportunity to apply to a jury show and hosted the fall 2020 MSU Denver student exhibition. This spring CVA decided to once again open the gallery up to the current students of the spring 2020 BFA class as well as any fall 2020 BA and BFA class who did not apply to the previous exhibition. Not to be confused with the thesis show, this exhibition does highlight the thesis work though of 13 students who submitted proposals and were accepted. I commend each artist on their compelling concepts and artwork and thank them for participating in both the exhibition and this virtual artist talk. Let's hear from whom you really came to listen, the artists. Each artist has seven minutes to speak and then three minutes for Q&A. If you have any questions for any of the speakers at any time, please type them into the conversation box and I will read them to each artist at the end of their presentation. All right, our first speaker is Beatrice Drew. Beatrice, will you please turn on your camera and Mike? Hi Beatrice, thanks for being here. My wife I have been a little finicky today so I do apologize if I cut out at any point just just let me know and I can repeat what I've said. So adoption afterlife is the title of my work. Can we go to the next slide? The main drive behind adoption in the afterlife was the dogs. The first dog on the left, Frankie was our first personal family dog and she's the only dog that we had that we don't have anything physical from her. We chose not to take her ashes privately or anything so the main inspiration was that we don't have a physical object from these past dogs lives that can help me express the grief that I had for losing these animals and that often is a way that people do process their grief is through physical things and collecting those physical things from leashes to toys and more commonly these privately gathered ashes that are put in typically personalized urns but not very often. Next slide please. And the second inspiration was from my work. I currently work at a animal hospital in the boarding department and when you're in boarding you get to have these very personal experiences with these animals that the owners don't have all their way. So in your mind and we like to think the dog's mind that we are their like temporary family or kind of like their second family and so about the dogs and if they've like been coming to us since they were puppies we grow they grew up with us and we have these really strong connections so when they pass away we have this massive their ink prints if the hospital does provide that if we are their main you know hospital and we always post photos if we're not able to get the prints and these are a few I don't mean to interrupt right now but maybe if you turn off your camera it might ease the bandwidth a little bit and you might stop cutting out just as much. Okay just let me know if that helps. I'm sorry about my Wi-Fi. No it can't help it's okay it seems to be helping so far. Okay that's good to hear but yeah so we have this massive cork board with the animals that have passed away that we have really tight and close connections with. Next slide please. In terms of the process of this work I mainly have sketches of ideations that I had and drawings that I drew as I was thinking up this work. The two sketches on the left are kind of inspiration drawings that I had made. I initially was going to make in a more interactive pieces of work but then there was the thought of incorporating the dog ashes into a piece and so that was also scrapped and then that sketch was something I had made for another family dog that had passed away very early in his life and that kind of prompted me as well to create something more now memorializing and the two sketches on the right were initial display I had if I had added color to the shelves so that's just some ideation that was present while I was creating this work. Next slide please and these are images of the work as it was made. The one on the far left is one of the urns in its leather hard state which is kind of when I would hand build the little figurines to put them on top so that they had that support. The two images on the top are before and after firing and then that bottom image is some extra urns that I made as kind of like a safety net in case things didn't work out and also just some experimentation with urn shapes. And next slide please and these are the final images of my work if you have not seen them in the gallery yet. These are the images that I chose to present to you and these are the final pieces from left to right. We have Kona, Rudy, Scarlett, Scout, and Four and those are all of my pieces and I appreciate all of you looking at my work and coming to listen to me talk about it and I am happy to take any questions that you may have in case I did cut out too much. I can answer any questions about my work. Yeah Beatrice I have a question. You mentioned that you were going to incorporate the use of the ashes into the work. You did so in the glaze mixture right? You started out with like a base and then added each dog separately? Yeah so sorry I kind of breezed through that. I made a glaze from scratch essentially in order to incorporate those dogs ashes into the glaze. So what about the the dog's specific makeup of their ashes? How did that influence the colors and they're also different? Yeah so I likened the dog ashes to what you could call bone ash which is pretty commonly used in ceramics. They do kind of lean to the grayer side color and since close to bone ash but not quite bone ash they kind of reacted a little differently to the colors. I did add colors in there but at the end of the day the ashes kind of dominated the end result of color and texture which is kind of what I was going for. I wanted the ashes to speak for themselves a little in terms of texture and color and that's kind of how they chose to display themselves. I think that's amazing. So we do have a couple of questions or comments in the chat here so I'll go ahead and read it to you. Jennifer asks hi can you please turn off your camera and your mic. Thank you. Jenna says your work reminds me of ancient egyptian urns and figurines was that an intentional influence? It was yeah I did some research on kind of ancient urns and a lot of them were like egyptian and roman inspired they're like traditional urn shapes so yeah great and then Diana says they were able to see your work in person they love it and you answered all their questions too nice work. Oh that's great to hear. All right thank you Beatrice so much for being part of this exhibition and this artist talk since we don't have any more questions we'll go ahead and move on to our next speaker. Let's see we have Sarah Folsom up next. Sarah can you please turn on your microphone and your camera. Hey how are you doing well how are you tonight? I'm good excited to talk about my work. Good go ahead and get started once Jenna has those slides up for you thank you for joining us. Perfect thank you all right so my series is titled how do you feel and a little bit about me I'm currently an art education student at Metro and I've got a concentration in ceramics and we'll be graduating this fall. Next slide please so from a young age I was around people with various mental illnesses and my personal experience with mental illness helped me see a major problem and that was that the emotions and situations that they trigger are often difficult to communicate to others and sometimes even yourself and so as I was getting further in my art education degree I was really pushing my work to be more personal and I knew that my personal experiences would be relatable to many others in that I could create work that was meaningful for myself as well as the community and this series also came at a time that I was being more experimental with my ceramic work and trying to expand from making traditionally functional ceramic wear which was primarily what I was doing before this and so these ceramic vessels aim to create a space and dialogue of shared experiences for what it feels like living with a mental illness. I knew that I wanted to share personal experiences of people around me people who I may not even know live with the mental illness so last spring when I started beginning this I sent out a call on social media asking people who would be willing to participate and allow me to interview them for this work. Next slide please so going into each interview I had a set of questions to ask in order to help me better with better make the vessels and help with the ideation for each one so this interview included questions with adjectives they would describe their mental illness with the color they would assign to it and what shape they wanted for their vessel so shown here are a couple of the beginning stages of the shapes that I had them choose from and also the notes from one of the interviews and kind of the ideation of what that looked like and the interview process was really key for me in this series for opening the gate into making work for myself and for others each person really trusted me to share their personal experiences and emotions with but they also trusted me to translate them into a physical form and create a vessel that was representative of them so next slide please so each vessel has two parts there's an inside vessel and an outside one and the outer vessel acts as a protective barrier concealing the hidden emotions that the interior represents and so the inside vessel conveys what I see as a true representation of those difficult emotions we try to hide or keep quiet and both vessels were thrown on the wheel which is an act that requires a concentration and connection with the clay so as I made each vessel I tried to keep in mind the individual that I was making it for and the experiences that they had shared with me which really allowed me to go into a headspace to create each one unique to the individual and then after they were thrown on the wheel each vessel both the inside and the outside were altered dependent on the interview I had with them so some were cut up some were collapsed some were broken after they had dried and others used glazing to translate the emotions next slide please so from the outside each vessel is unglazed which exposes the white bare clay but when you get closer the inside of each vessel is glazed in a color different from the rest of them and keeping the outside vessels white not only unifies them but also translates that from the outside it's often difficult to tell what a person may be going through and that we really house a whole array of emotions usually on the inside they're also displayed on independent on individual floating shelves to represent an individual's experience but they also come together to represent a collective experience of living with a mental illness and then the mirror behind each vessel creates a space where the viewer is not isolated or alone they're looking back at a reflection of themselves and the vessels may seem unaltered when looking at them straight on but from the view in the mirror they're cracked broken or dismantled revealing the vessel inside next slide please uh creating the series and ceramics also allowed for many parallels between the ideas that I was exploring in this work and the medium of ceramics clay when it is beginning to dry is extremely fragile and there's a fragility as well in emotions feeling as though you may break at any moment and uncertainty is also part of the experience when working with clay from firing it to forming it to glazing it each stage has its own chances of mishaps and unpredictability and such is the same with the effects of mental illness there's a level of uncertainty as to when the effects will strike and what emotions they may trigger and each vessel acts as a series each vessel acts as a portrait and while these are not traditional portraits and that they show they don't show the person's facial features or body features they do share the sitter's likeness in personality characteristics and their personal experiences and while these also act as portraits each individual that they're representative for are not defined by their mental illness and it is not the only characteristic in their lives it's just to capture one aspect that they find themselves dealing with and some days are better than others but the vessels are meant to capture the feelings that accompany the mental illness both on good and bad days and that concludes my presentation thank you for listening thank you so much Sarah that was very informative and thorough and wow what a deep concept and you took so much time to really connect with each the people I'm really just kind of blown away by that I don't see any questions in the chat but I do have a question for you you have one or two very specific pieces that have more adornment on the outside like texture experimentation or carving into or teeth I think are some of them coming out of like mouths what was your reasoning for those ones specifically to actually really embellish the outside vessel yeah so those ones were really dependent on the interview and the individual for instance the one with carving talked about kind of in that pristine nature and so kind of that embellishment of taking like a perfect vessel and really dismantling it and then the one with the teeth the individual had PTSD and so they talked about really being guarded and so that's where where that came in it kind of acted as like spikes and a protective protective shield wow that's really interesting I do see a couple of chat or questions popping up in the chat now so I'll go ahead and ask those sorry I lost my screen here for a sec okay do you see yourself or sorry Emily asks do you see yourself continuing this series and adding vessels yeah I think I think I just started thinking about that and I would love to continue it I think I would like to add more vessels but I also think I'd be interested in pursuing this topic and ideation more in other mediums too and see how that would translate sorry about that that makes total sense I have another question from Leah do you have a website or place where we can see more of the individual explanations of each piece I've got each in individual vessel pictured on the MSU Denver thesis webpage but I haven't added individual ones to my website but I will definitely be doing that in the next couple weeks and I love the idea of adding individual explanations for each piece so I will definitely be taking that into consider consideration I think all of us would like to know more about each individual piece of how that came to be um oops okay we have another question we have one from Diana or actually it's a statement beautiful work I was able to be one of the participants and the process itself was therapeutic and instrumental in my own personal healing process thank you Sarah that's awesome it looks like we have one more person typing but if you wanted to respond to Diana while that's happening okay I very much appreciate that and I know it was healing for many other participants as well I love how artwork can do that all right one last statement from Alexis they say amazing wonderful work I am so impressed and touched by the beauty of your project all right thank you Sarah once again for joining us for the artist talk and for the exhibition um I will then be moving on to the next artist please turn off your camera and your mic okay next up we have Hannah Sherman can I can you please turn on your camera and microphone thank you thanks so much for being here yeah thank you for having me all right so my name is Hannah Sherman um thank you for coming to this artist talk and I will be talking about my body of work that I titled sincerely me next slide please so this is sincerely me and it represents 42 individuals who have impacted my life in one way or another um I associated a symbol to each person based on their lesson and their influence and it represents my relationship and my community next slide when I was starting this thesis process I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do and so I began reflecting on my own artwork and why I make art and I realized that I was making artwork for these relationships and I was already associating symbols to them and so I wanted to translate that into a bigger body of work and so I started with paintings next slide please so I started as I as I mentioned with these paintings um and I wanted to keep them in a black and white color palette to represent memory and nostalgia this is one of them that I began working on and if we could go to the next slide please this is another one that I had started so I was again um associating a symbol with each person in my life um friends family relationships really anyone and everyone who I could think of and I wanted to keep that consistency of the black and white but as I was creating these paintings it just wasn't quite what I wanted and so I really went into this journey of experimentation and exploration of different mediums next slide please so I began working with mylar and as you can see here it kind of is more towards what sincerely me is finalized as and so with the mylar I was experimenting with pen and color pencil and every step in this journey that I took is how I ended up with my final piece with my final body of work um next slide please during this time of taking thesis in AIS I actually took another class the visual journal class and each week we had to create a series of drawings and I really started to experiment with pen and I actually fell in love with the medium I fell in love with the technique the style um the manipulation of the pen on paper that represents time um and I was really drawn to that and you know memory and nostalgia could really be emphasized with the pen and those were themes that I found myself just constantly being drawn to and during this time I was really inspired by Paul Heaston who was a Denver based artist and he works a lot with pen next slide please so during this time of exploration I actually was working on glass and I still had one central painting which I ended up taking out entirely and during this process I actually held up the glasswork to the painting and I discovered the shadows and something just clicked and I knew that I had to have my final thesis work have shadows because again it represents distorted memories and the temporality of time and that's exactly what I wanted to help emphasize these relationships in my life next slide please so instead of glass I actually discovered the use of plexiglass and the pen work on it just again it just clicked everything just started falling into place and so with the plexiglass I was able to cast the shadows I was able to have layers I was able to manipulate the pen work on it um and I was also able to keep the black and white which is what I had originally started with next slide please it just the pen on plexiglass was just I fell in love with it it was exactly what I needed to do for my body work and with the plexiglass I was actually able to make three different sizes and so each size of sincerely me represents the impact that a person had on my life so the greater the piece the greater the influence and so I have eight inch by ten inch I have five inch by seven inch and then lastly four inch by six inch so I was able to have three varying sizes which was important in my body of work next slide please and so well while I was creating this it was so important to me because how I was able to manipulate the pen on the plexiglass I was so enveloped in each of these drawings I was taken back to the memories with these people to the moments I the nostalgia that I felt for each and every one of these people was so important throughout this entire process but also in the final installation of the work the the level of detail that I was able to create through each drawing like reflects the time the love the just everything that I wanted to show within sincerely me next slide please and going back to me falling in love with the shadows and the time element that could be created plexiglass had the ability to I could hang them and it just it worked out so beautifully with the plexiglass being able to hang and sway and reflect memories and distorted memories especially and how everything changes within our lives as we go through life next slide please and so it all just came together so beautifully to create these 41 drawings representing people who have influenced my life and everyone hanging before you has impacted me in some way I am who I am because of them but not only that is the the symbols I would hope that other people when they look at it that they can be able to connect with it in some way they can reflect on their own lives they can reflect on their own relationships and begin to think about their own memories and be transported to the past or even to the future because of nostalgia and so you know this body of work really encompasses how like we are not meant to walk this earth alone and every one of these people have helped me in some way thank you thank you so much Hannah the work really is stunning and those shadows really do create that feeling of distant memory and nostalgia I think it's really well executed uh how did you come up with the installation method to hang them um that was a really big process because I'm actually a ceramics major with a drawing as a complimentary and so you know beginning it when I when I knew that I wanted the shadows it was like okay well how can I hang them and plexiglass we're able to drill holes into it and then um fishing line was my first go to with hanging it and then um I have a mesh if you've been to the cva I have a mesh that hangs from the ceiling and then I was able to hang each one individually so that I could vary the distance between each other and then also their heights as I wanted it to like when you look at it you see all of them but they're not quite um layered against each other hopefully that answers your question it does okay and the work you are able to just kind of move your eyes through the entire work it's really an experience yes okay um do we have any other questions if you have any questions please type them into the chat looks like we don't have anybody typing right now but if you do have any we can also try to circle back at the end if you think of one on the way Hannah thanks again so much for joining us tonight um your presentation was wonderful and I will be moving on to the next artist thank you thank you next up we have Lea Schumper Lea can you turn on your camera and your mic please welcome and thank you for being here hi thanks for having me all right so once that presentation gets loaded if you'd just like to get started okay all righty hi um my name is Lea Schumper um and I am currently studying to get a BFA in art education right now at Metro and the title of my work is called COT if you go on to the next slide so here's just an idea since if anyone hasn't been in the gallery I just wanted to give an idea of the size of my work and how it's set up so um it is 20.5 by 15 inches if you go on to the next one all right so as an artist uh some subject matters that have really inspired me in my work is my own life experience my family and um psychology really interests me as well as the subconscious and so for my thesis work I knew that I wanted to focus on something in regards to one of those subject matters um and during before like during AIS I was going through a really hard time getting out of a pretty emotionally abusive relationship and I was kind of struggling to figure out um what to do and how to get through that and so I decided to make my work um about my process of getting through that if you go on to the next slide please I'll just kind of talk and let y'all look at the images um while I speak and we'll just kind of go through them um so oftentimes for me it's a struggle to vocalize what I'm feeling and I know that abusive relationships are a lot more common than than we like to talk about and so as an art educator or future art educator I wanted to make my own work personal and um I wanted to be vulnerable so that my future students and maybe other people who view the work can can display their own emotions through their work or vocalize what they're going through as well if if need be so next slide please so this work was very therapeutic and the process of drawing is kind of meditative for me and so that's what um I I use I use drawing to to kind of get me into a a flow state where I can kind of focus and just recoup a bit next slide please um so I decided to use charcoal in my work because I love I just love the way how you can get like super stark tones and so I wasn't a very dark place which is why I wanted to have that dark background and I wanted my work to be um representative of other people if if um so that they could connect to it I guess and so that's why it's kind of ambiguous and you can't really tell if it's male or female because it is it is very much something that is a universal problem and in my research for this you can go on to the next slide I found out that over 10 million Americans deal with psychological or physical abuse from people in their families or people that they are close to and so yeah I just want to make it kind of a universal image a series of images I also like to use the charcoal because you can it also represents like being burned in a relationship and charcoal is made out of burned wood and so that is also of it next slide please and I also wanted to use the netting in my work because it's it's a thin netting that you can break out of but you can also get pretty entangled in it if if you so choose and um so that kind of represents how it was my choice that like got me my choices that got me into this situation but um it also allowed me to get out of the situation too next slide so I'll talk about the images a little bit more individually so this is the first image of the series and in this image my hands are just very delicate and vulnerable which represented my youthfulness and ignorance of getting into this relationship with an older person um and the small bit of netting represents the tiny red flags that I let slip through the cracks in the beginning one artist that I really connect with whose musician is Halsey and in one of her songs she says the warning signs can feel like they're butterflies and so that's kind of what this image is about is just like my vulnerability before getting into it because a lot of people before getting into this situation don't really realize what they're getting into next slide so this is the second image of the series and in this image my hands are becoming more entangled and I'm allowing the netting to consume my hands without fighting back if I wanted to I could easily break the net but I choose the opposite and I'm allowing myself to become consumed with it all righty third image next one please so this is the third image here and um this one represents me realizing what I've gotten myself into and kind of the panic of starting to realize that you need to get out of this and this isn't correct but you feel so entangled and trapped that that it feels impossible to get out um and a lot of people don't understand what that's like and so it is very it's a very isolating experience um next slide please um so in this one it represents me deciding to break free and and um understanding that if I if I didn't get out then I would be consumed and so this one is just me using all of my power to like break out of it and next slide and this is my final image so this is the release and so this is I'm still kind of in this process of um letting go and like finally getting the power to get out but the netting is still in the image because there's still some PTSD and anxiety that is very pertinent with people who go through these types of situations so it's fading away but it's it's still definitely there um and so that is my fifth image and if you go on to the next one I think yeah it's back up to there so the varying heights of my work represents where I was at mentally at that point in time so um the last image is like my highest point and the bottom one is obviously my lowest point in time and I hope that with this work that people can kind of be more empathetic towards those who are going through this type of a situation or that um if someone is going through this that they can kind of find it within themselves to to really make the decision of what to do um and I hope that they break out of it because the sooner the better on it um so yeah that's my work thanks for coming guys well thank you so much Leah for sharing such a vulnerable subject and I'm so glad that you are finding your way out of that thank you um the work is beautiful it's stunning and I'm so glad you spoke about the arrangement and the compositions on the wall and how they relate to your mental state at that time or the height of your mental state um I did have a question we've I have a few people that are typing in the chat right now so I'll go ahead and ask my question um did you begin with an additive or a reductive um process of drawing those did you start with the whole black page and reduce you know an erase away or did you add to that so I added to it it was just white pieces of paper and um yeah I just started with the hands and then the background was my last part um with just a stub of charcoal just pressing it on there so yeah nice thank you all right we've got Emily typing right now I do love the amount of detail that you were able to get in those hands with that charcoal too sometimes it can get a little muddy I was really impressed thank you okay so Emily asks did you find the process of drawing such detailed images helped you further your process further process your emotions about the relationship um yeah I it was like it was weird because it was more of like me getting to know myself rather than like I mean it was also me just like processing how it all happened and stuff but like it doing the tiny details like it really gets me focused and so I can just kind of just let whatever thoughts run through my mind and I I guess yeah it did help me further process my emotions about it after this works it's kind of funny because like I'm in a way different place than I was a year ago um so it's interesting looking back um I'm just like in a way better spot now and so yeah definitely helped good again the power of making right all right so Dory um has a comment and a question she says thank you for sharing beautiful work were these based off of a series of photographs or a short film you took of your hands breaking free so um I took photos on some of them and then some of them like the release one it was like it was a video and then I had to pause it and I like screenshotted that and then um yeah did the drawings based off of that interesting so you were able to capture that movement of it falling away from your hands yeah it took a little bit but yeah awesome well thank you thank you again so much Leah for sharing with us today appreciate your time and your beautiful work thank you um we will be moving on to our next speaker and our last speaker will be Emily Hammack Emily can you please turn on your camera and your microphone hi hello thanks for being here and wrapping us up tonight okay all right once we get that presentation loaded up um you look like you're kind of glitching a little bit so if you want to turn your camera off to hopefully free up some of that bandwidth you're more than welcome to do so okay hopefully the internet holds up um and are you hearing me okay now yep loud and clear all right well thank you all for presenting your beautiful artwork and thank you all for coming my name is Emily Hammack and I am an art education major and I'm also a have a concentration in sculpture with a complement of painting which kind of just means I'm a multimedia artist um so next slide please um my project is called crowned rulers and um I started the uh I approached the idea of a thesis project from an art education standpoint because it's so important to my art practice um while I've been in school um and I wanted to explore the material culture of classrooms and that was kind of all I really started with I didn't know what it was going to end up looking like and I just decided to start collecting objects and um really engaging with them and thinking about how they've been used in classrooms um thinking about where I got the objects so I tried to thrift some of them so that they would be used and and sort of worn and um um I also came across a theory that's emerging in art education um and the idea of object empathy where um it's helpful to visualize maybe the possible feelings or lives of objects um and I came at that from kind of a scarcity uh viewpoint because it's so prevalent in art education next slide please um so this is Diana Spungen's drawing of a house and it was sort of when I first heard about object empathy and the artist covered the this boarded up abandoned house in um pencil markings to sort of pay tribute to it and um that was a result of this engagement of object empathy and and feeling sad for the house and wanting to commemorate it in the artist's own way uh next slide please so the object that I decided to stick with that I felt like had the most contextual um meat I guess you could say was the ruler and I thought about how they were materially how their tools that we use in art classrooms and just every day we want to draw a straight line um and also culturally rulers kind of have symbolic evidence of this dichotomy of inches and centimeters or the ways that we measure things which has a lot of art education connections in assessment and measuring and the various ways that we measure learning next slide please so I wanted to manipulate the rulers and subvert their original use um as a way to well it came to me through brainstorming so it was part of the creative process but the idea of turning them into crowns was a way to subvert the original use and um ideologically crowns kind of also represent this withholding of traditions in western cultures especially um the idea of monarchies and I wanted to flip that because I saw that the philosophies I learned about that I more aligned with in our art education and education in general are more aligned with democracy and group decisions um and a focus on community as well as individualism and not just either or uh next slide please so this was the crown as it ended up and then I didn't want these objects I continued to melt different rulers and I didn't want them to be static objects so I thought I returned to my art education materials next slide please and I played around with glitter glue and I wanted to represent um a metaphoric object for the crowns to circle around and it basically represents the brain and learning and I used the colors to sort of simulate medical imagery and brain scans next slide please and then I projected light through what was the brain splice made out of glitter glue uh next slide please um and this is the resulting installation where it all came together sort of in a way that viewers can interact with it it's hung in the gallery at a height where most people can walk underneath it and um the crowns are arranged in a circle to sort of ritualize this collective um focus of knowledge but also each individual having their personal agency and their own little crown sort of to control um their learning um that concludes my talk so just does anybody have any questions I have some detail shots at the end of the slide of just the various multi rulers we do have a question from Cornelia their question is how did you melt the rulers I used a heat gun to melt the rulers and to my surprise they didn't they didn't take much heat to to start becoming malleable so it was quite the give and take and a very trial and error based process to figure out how to stretch it without it overheating or bubbling did it take several practice ones to kind of get that right or did it pretty much work in your favor right away um it did what I meant to mention with the second slide the title slide um it had a pile of kind of detritus that was the result of many failures and bits broken off and um yeah it was a fun process but definitely not perfect perfect the first try but then it was kind of fun melting things though yes with the proper ventilation right so I do have one more question um I can't help but correlate the process of molding and forming the crowns as a metaphor for molding the brains and personality of the students through the education and learning process was this your intention it is one of many uh the ideas of you know bending the rules were also played around with um and the the the specific terminology that we used to describe learning um like what you're saying Kristen was part of the mind maps and the brainstorming that I did I have so many phrases written down of the way that we talk about molding minds and learning and creativity in all these different more visual ways well I think your material and your execution really bring those thoughts to life so congratulations thank you thank you well if we don't have any other questions um appearing in the chat it doesn't look like we do I would like to once again thank all of you for being part of this MSU Denver student exhibition artist talk and we hope you all have a wonderful evening visit our website www.msudenver.edu backslashcda for future events take care and thank you so much