Life > April 16, 2003

By Sarah Ware

Old Gold and Black Reviewer

In the last few weeks of the spring semester, senior artists are wrapping up their final masterpieces created at Wake Forest. 

Five of these seniors have chosen to work toward an Honors in Art degree, displaying their work upstairs in the Hanes Fine Art Gallery located in Scales Fine Arts Center.

Jenny Ryf began the display with her collection of work, “The Game: Self-Portraits.”  In a mixture of painting and sculpture, she has taken childhood crayon drawings and elaborated them into more sophisticated works, exploring the differences between the two and the meaning of the early ones. 

Her paintings feature mostly self-portraits, and her sculpture and mixed media play with the idea of “the game.”

T.J. Peeler uses the same theme in her series of self-portraits to be displayed May 15 to 19.  She examines notions of different perceptions of herself by painting mirror images in an effort to get at the essence of a person. 

They feature her in a bathroom, a place where one can “physically strip down and examine yourself in the mirror,” and endeavor to connote ideas of nudity, honesty, self-awareness, privacy, introspection and examination. 

Upon working through this study, she has concluded that “you can never get to know yourself in totality because the self is not static.  You and your perception of yourself are constantly changing.”

In her show, “Dwelling Place,” Robyn Washington uses photographs, digital prints and video to explore the different interpretations of a photograph.

Using mostly her family as subjects and their home of a rural South Carolina town as her setting, she “question(s) the relationships between reality and memory, the past and the representation thereof.” 

She plays with the idea of “ethos,” a Greek word literally meaning “dwelling place,” how something as physical as a bulding can exhibit ethos, and how this ethos can be passed on through photography and art. This collection will be on display April 28 to May 1.

Amanda Tiller focuses on printmaking as the medium for her series, in the gallery next, from April 21 to 25. 

With color reduction relief prints, a technique involving carving from a woodblock and printing several times over with ink, she explores the idea of Rorschach testing by responding to the grain in the wood she carves from. 

“The images are influenced by my personal thoughts and outlooks as well as connotations of the materials,” Tiller explained.

The final exhibition, shown from May 5 to 9, is by Doc Riedel, featuring a combination of paintings and sculpture. 

His theme is scars, those both literal and metaphorical.  He understands that everyone has scars of some sort, making it a universal identifier, and ventures to convey this in his work. 

“The purpose of my work,” Riedel said, “is to demonstrate scars that we can all identify with, and understand that we don’t have to be at odds with one other because ultimately, we’ve all experienced pain.”

The seniors will trade out exhibitions until their graduation at the end of the semester, and their final test will be appearing before a panel of art professors to critique their work.

The exhibitions are being shown for free, and the hours for the gallery are listed on the school’s Web site.