Students of Normal

The Transpace Gallery at Illinois State University in the CVA is always a very simple great environment to view some great student works. It showcased a wide variety of mediums that included sculpture, video, painting, prints, and many more, all created by students at Illinois State. Each piece was created in their own way and you could tell each one was created by a different person with very different mediums and taste. Knowing some of the artists and having been in classes with a few I could really see their style manifest in their work.

Sarah Foote
Nobody Reads Anymore
Mixed media on canvas

Nobody Reads Anymore by Sarah Foote (mixed media on canvas) was a piece that caught my eye right away and after reading the title of the work I quickly came up with some ideas as to what it was trying to be. After a quick google search I found out Sarah seems to have a background in painting and graphic design and as a freshman she, with the help of some other students, made a sculpture of Reggie (Illinois state’s mascot) out of recycled materials, which now sits outside of Vrooman Center on the East side campus. Its interesting that she has a background in painting yet her work, including the piece in this exhibition seems to include a lot of sculpture and grids. I imagine the grid comes from her design background, but she mixes her painting and design very well in this piece by moving around the text from a page in a book to make it almost unreadable. The text also seems to represent caution tape that a police force would put on a doorway to a crime scene. The way it is just sloppily put in a cross shape all across the piece implying that Nobody Reads Anymore. The white “paint” over the text also seems to be censoring the “page”, or implying that people don’t notice, or realize the many things books can do, or how much you can learn from reading a book.

Lyzz Lundberg & Amanda Weygand
Hallway No. 5 : Swallows
Acrylic on archival inkjet print

Hallway No. 5 : Swallows by Lyzz Lundberge & Amanda Weygand (Acrylic on archival inkjet print) is a very bright piece that also caught my eye very quickly due to its bright and high value colors. At first I thought the colors were strips of duct tape placed over the picture with some acrylic mixed in, but the closer I came to the image I realized it was just thicker paint which gave it a little shine. When I look at this piece I see a hallway I walk down everyday. For it to be called “Hallway No. 5” kind of makes me think of it as a maze or one of the many hallways I walk down mindlessly daily. Everyday as a student we walk down all these always, almost unknowingly, as we follow our class schedule each day. I really think this piece is trying to show or represent the fact that as students we can get swallowed up in our schedules, classes, and work that we are kind of just mindlessly walking through hallways endlessly. Hallway No. 1, 2, and 3 on Monday then 4, 5, and 6 on Tuesday and repeat everyday of the week like robots.

Kale Stewart
Untitled
Kilncast glass, concrete
2014

Kale Stewart’s piece of concrete and kilncast glass is a blocky/curved sculpture that reminds me of my childhood yet the edge of adulthood I teeter on now. This piece makes me picture the alphabet blocks that young children or babies play with and stack because of the way each cube is placed on top of each other in this piece. It’s almost exactly like a baby or child would stack blocks. Yet it still makes me think of what a college student is going through: their final years before going out into the actual world and finding a job: no parents, no rules, responsibilities. Each block being right on the edge or the unstable look of the piece makes me think of life after college or life right now right (right before life after college).

Transpace is a great atmosphere to display student art and seems to always display great pieces. The gallery space is always full of great works and different mediums that get me thinking about all kinds of ideas and the people who made them.