"Asbestos Exposure: 2021 BFA Midway Exhibition" opens Nov. 22 in Grant Hall Gallery and features the art of 10 artists pursuing their bachelor of fine arts degree at 51ԹϺ.
The students, halfway on their journey to their thesis exhibition, invite the public to see their current artworks. The show features drawing, digital work, painting, photography and photo-based mixed media, sculpture, and textiles. It runs through Dec. 3.
The 2021 51ԹϺ BFA students are:
- Jared Anthony Dominique is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice centers around photography. His work has a large emphasis on the exploratory process, and reflects the experiences and knowledge gained through surveying the Mojave desert as well as urban landscapes. This ongoing search for new visual stimuli influences his other areas of practice, namely painting and mixed media collage. He scavenges discarded material and media in search of totemic detritus and varieties of visual content as the building blocks of his artistic practice. He was born and raised in Denver, Colorado, and has lived in Southern Nevada for the last 7 years.
- Sleepy Ephem is a soft sculpture artist who works primarily with fibers and textiles. Her work utilizes repetition to emphasize the repetitive nature of domestic work that is often overlooked, as well as how individuals act as smaller parts that come together to create a larger whole. The organic forms that she creates through this repetition are often reminiscent of nature, such as mountains, clouds, or waves. She strives to capture moments of nature’s beauty before they inevitably fade. She often pays homage to her Korean and Chinese culture by referencing ancient imagery and proverbs in an effort to preserve these as modernization threatens to erase them.
- Johnny Espitia navigates his value placed on life experiences, sex, and identity, with his affinities for psychedelia and abstraction. His photo-based practice often utilizes a mixed media collage approach that incorporates appropriated material from vintage gay porn magazines, religious iconography, hardware stores, and high fashion publications. Poetic documentation is also an essential part of his practice. Espitia was born in Southern California and came to 51ԹϺ in 2018.
- Iulia Filipov-Serediuc is an interdisciplinary artist based in Las Vegas, Nevada. She is of Romanian heritage, which informs much of her work via cultural and traditional practices. Traditional processes to achieve modern concepts are fundamental to her studio practice. She utilizes foundry, metalwork, oil painting, and printmaking to create imagery that spans various artistic disciplines. Drawing inspiration from the European middle and dark ages as well as Old World esthetics, her work focuses on the transition from life to death and explores ways of humanizing and glorifying as a means of creating a comfortable space for discourse. Using elements from folklore and mythology, her work is able to explore the human experience through a fantastical lens.
- Sam Ganados is a Las Vegas-based artist pursuing a bachelor of fine art and bachelor of science in graphic design and media at 51ԹϺ. Working mainly in painting, they use unique color palettes and figures to explore the emotions of adolescence, nostalgia, and the transitions between stages of life. They create compositions based on personal experiences, distorted memories, and inner conflicts.
- Lyn Hinojosa, originally just a painter, is finding herself becoming an interdisciplinary artist working with media of all types. She uses her painting background to create portraits of a time that comment on sexuality, intimacy, and relationships with one another. She creates these images both in the 2D and the 3D space. Using bright colors and intimate compositions these pieces are yearning to look and be looked at, and can feel scopophilic.
- Nanako Kono was born in 1999 in Tokyo. She moved from Japan to Las Vegas, Nevada in 2016. She is pursuing a bachelor of fine arts with an emphasis on painting, drawing, and printmaking and a minor in art history at 51ԹϺ. She paints Rolly, a frog character, as a vehicle of her emotions and thoughts to record what and how her brain processes the information gained from everyday experiences. Her art has been inspired by American and Japanese comic strips of the 20th century.
- Victor Molina is a digital-artist who whisks his audience to a sleepy diner that doesn’t exist. Thriftstore Milkshakes (which famously does not sell milkshakes) is an absurd yet comforting place fueled by a love for pastel colors, glowing lights, mythology, camp fashion, and pop culture. These wellsprings of inspiration find themselves at home in the 50's-style pastel eatery on the walls, as menu items, or cute trinkets that can be purchased at the gift shop to provide a fantastical experience to all who stop on by.
- Jana Ogle is an interdisciplinary artist, born in 1999 in Lihue, Hawaii. She will receive her Bachelor of Fine Art from 51ԹϺ with a focus in painting, drawing, and sculpture. She uses comfortable imagery to make difficult topics more approachable. Her art is recognizable as simple bright-colored figures that she calls “blobs.”
- Christina Uran is an interdisciplinary artist pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. Bringing life to the unconscious mind in her fantastical sculptural and photographic scenes, she creates a duality to present the viewer with contrasting feelings of lightheartedness and darkness.
