Senior year is a challenging time for most but can also be incredibly rewarding when you see the fruits of your labor come to life. A culmination of years of your life can feel overwhelming to anyone. It is often difficult to imagine what that looks like but the effort you put in is never a waste.
The Senior Design Showcase happens April 20 through May 8 at the Laird Norton building in downtown Winona. Dreaming is the familiar concept that they decided they would base their showcase around. What makes it interesting though, is the way in which the showcase is set up. There are six concepts within the idea of dreaming and each artist is representative of one of these concepts. Though, the ideas are paired with one another, so the artists have been able to collaborate within their pairs.
Flying and Falling is done by Kira Kainz and Sadie Marks who have worked together to bring this idea of risk and reward. As Marks described “The higher you fly, the further you have to fall,” which will be embodied in their showcase. They are concepts that cannot really exist without one another.
Remembering and Forgetting is the section done by Addie DeMars and Lily Schartau. Both remembering and forgetting have certain ideas associated with them but “sometimes. Remembering isn’t nice and sometimes forgetting isn’t bad,” DeMars explained. With this showcase they will be able to demonstrate how they have worked together to show the nuance of both ideas.
Transforming and Awakening involved pieces done by Alison Buck and Thea McAdams. These concepts might not be pairs as much as others “I know compared to all the other groups our words are more separate,” McAdams described. They decided to think of it as a circle of life type thing instead of the direct paralleling the other pairs are doing. McAdams described the transforming piece and the growth of an egg into a caterpillar and the eat and grow and that shifts into awakening by exploring the “life cycle of how different parts of your life can bring you to this culmination of everything,” Buck detailed.
There have been more ups than downs throughout the process of getting the showcase to a presentable place, something everyone could seem to agree on. “It’s been like a journey, definitely. It sometimes feels like a lot, but I feel like we started a little bit last semester and we’re going through all these different processes, as we go,” shared McAdams. These students have spent a lot of time and effort to make sure that this showcase would turn out the best they could make it, “we’ve never really spent a whole entire semester working on one project, so having the time to really pick apart […] every single detail is very different. And it’s been a fun learning experience,” explained Schartau.
Bojić Danilo, who is the professor in charge of leading the showcase with the students, described that “people see the polished show at the end and nobody sees, not days, not weeks but months of work that goes into that.” There is a lot of hidden work that goes into making not only the art but making sure the space is seamless. “You want it to seem so intuitive, that you don’t even know I did it. People will come into the space and be like, ‘oh not much happening,’ but each centimeter of the space has been planned out meticulously,” explained DeMars. Before students could even start working on their project they had to go to their space and measure out how much space people would need to walk through, which put constraints on what they would and would not be able to do.
Going to the showcase is a good way to get involved with the community, “I definitely think it’s a good way to support like the other students,” Buck enthused. Not only is it art, it’s art from your fellow student.
