In order to allow the artists extra time to work on their projects, Residence Life will allow senior art students to stay in Ytterboe Hall over spring break, provided they find a friend’s room to stay in.

Although the idea of sleeping in someone else’s bed could be a deterrent to staying on campus, several seniors have chosen to do so while others will continue their work off-campus.

“I think it is great that they allow senior art majors the opportunity for extra studio time,” Nick Kosack ’05 said. “Really, this [time] is the most important thing about being an art major.”

Even though Kosack’s plans for spring break already include off-campus rock climbing, he will need the Dittmann art studios to work on his project; a ceramic series exploring the relation between the acts of creation and destruction.

“For me, process always comes first. I am interested in creating something new and experimenting with what can be done with clay,” Kosack said. “I then step back and look at what I am attracted to, what works and what patterns arise. Often the conceptual aspect of the work is already there.”

Kosack said his series will consist of non-functional vessels and sculpture that have been deliberately destroyed, fired and reassembled.

Christina Osheim ’05, also plans to construct a ceramic installation.

She wants to explore the connections in her life that have become apparent over the last four years, such as connections between friends, professors, classes and life experiences.

Another installation project by Lewis Colburn ’05, will involve several large-scale structures built in wood, held together with 600 cast aluminum pegs.

“It revolves around creating a sort of tension between a stage set for an event [as in the theater] and the evidence of an event's having occurred in a space,” Colburn said. “I'm very attracted to a sort of ambiguity and tension in my work, creating a fiction which is not obviously a fiction, but not obviously factual either. Art is about burning, in both the literal and the figurative sense.”

Approximately 40 senior art majors’ work will be shown during the two senior art exhibits in Dittmann Art Gallery.

An opening reception will be held in Dittmann at the unveiling of each exhibit.

These exhibits emerge from the “Senior Studies in Studio Art” class, in which each student does independent work advised by one of six faculty advisors who attends the weekly class meetings to teach and counsel.

Senior Exhibit #1 runs Sunday, April 24-May 3 and Senior Exhibit #2 runs from Sunday, May 8-19.

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