Various Disasters
Senior Thesis Exhibition Spring 2021
Alyssa Tucker, Olivia Collins, and Morgan Grimes
&
Nicole Daskas
A Retrospective
Various Disasters – Senior Thesis Exhibition
Throughout this year everyone has experienced a disaster in some way shape or form. With obstacles at every turn this exhibition has been no exception. As quarantine continued to keep the university closed the Seniors were left to their own devices to create the work. Working in home studios, garages, and even the bedroom this exhibition is a show of perseverance and a culmination of a year of disasters. The work in the show explores themes of mental health struggles, internal turmoil, and quite literal nuclear disasters.
All three seniors in the Various Disasters exhibition have stayed true to their interests from their time here at Chapman University. For Olivia, she has remained interested in painting portraits and has moved to exclusively working in self-portraiture. For Morgan, she has kept her emphasis in the realm of science as she is also studying for degrees in biology and chemistry. Alyssa has been able to make art utilizing her passion for game development and create narratives about herself.
As a chemistry, biology, and art student, Morgan has spent her time at Chapman building an art practice that encompasses many different media and ideas. Allowing the work to dictate the medium, she has spent time working in photography, sculpture, drawing, painting, as well as installation. Her interests in both science and art have driven her to create interesting work that combines the two. For the culmination of her years at Chapman, her senior shows strives to incorporate her multimedia practice and science background by utilizing installation, video art, as well as painting, into a show about the history of nuclear disasters. As a recipient of both the Kip Thorne Art and Science grant in 2019 as well as the Creative and Scholarly Grant in 2020, she has explored themes of radiation and nuclear power in the United States and aims to dig deeper into the two largest nuclear disasters in human history.
Olivia Collins was born and raised in Southern California and focuses on work about self-image, what it means to be a woman, and femininity. She has explored a variety of mediums to create her work, however, she mostly works with oil paints, fabrics, and installation. Collins is interested in self-portraiture and has created pieces based on her image and other aspects of her life including personal belongings. Self-portraits are the most effective way for her to create pieces as they are only meant to portray her experiences and woman artist. For her senior exhibition she created four oil paintings depicting what has been classified by society as female emotions inspired by hysteria. Hysteria has been a theme that has been in previous works of Collins’, although, this series is the first to represent her personal connections to emotions that are seen lesser than by society. These pieces are to showcase her personal experiences to feminine emotions and bring power to them with larger than life paintings.
Alyssa Tucker has always been one to experiment with a variety of mediums but without fail all of her work comes back to topics relating to technology. As an artist and a game developer that has always had a passion for new technology. In this project she has combined both areas of interest, using game development techniques to create a piece solidly based in her artistic practice. Throughout time she has created work exploring topics of virtual space as it relates to physical space, as well as technology’s impact on the personal lives and identities of individuals. In her senior exhibition she explores both topics, using a virtual reality space in tandem with a physical installation to explore her own personal struggles and identity. This virtual reality experience is placed in a candy-coated version of the artist's own bedroom that evolves as a poem written about her own personal and mental struggle is narrated to the viewer. Creating a visual recreation of the artist’s own mental state for the viewer to experience for themselves.
Nicole Daskas – A Retrospective
According to ArtNet, only 11% of acquisitions at prominent American Museums over the past decade were of work by women artists. According to the National Museum of Women in the Arts, women earn 70% of BFAs and 65-75% of MFAs in the US, but only 46% of working artists are women. At the Art Basel Fairs, women made up less than 25% of the artists on view over the past four years. A recent survey of the permanent collections of 18 prominent art museums in the US found that the represented artists are 87% male and 85% white.
We need a feminist intervention!
Nicole Daskas: A Retrospective exhibition opening will take place Wednesday, April 28 at 7PM
Nicole Daskas is an artist from Las Vegas, Nevada. She is currently in her senior year of undergraduate studies at Chapman University. She will receive her BFA with an emphasis in performance and video art in May 2021. She has received grant funding from her university for both her junior and senior thesis exhibitions, as well as funding to pursue research in bodily fluids within feminist performance art. The resulting project, The Leaky Female Body, culminated in a digital archive of performances as well as a series of portraits in conjunction with the research. This project highlighted artists and works left out of the traditional Western art historical canon. Daskas has presented her research at university symposiums on three occasions and has been awarded at Chapman’s Departmental exhibitions. She currently works as a gallery assistant at Chapman University Guggenheim Gallery, where she curates and installs exhibitions of both professional and student work. Daskas was recently accepted to her first artist residency.