Tabula Rasa Senior Thesis Exhibitions April 3-5, 2022

Olivia Celesti

As a future art educator, the artist has dedicated the last five years to learning how the child’s mind creates artwork. Similarly to her students, the artist has fallen in love with controlled chaos on the page. Her body of work explores the process of artmaking through the eyes of adult and child. As those two perspectives of the artist meshed together when creating the artwork, it left her with many questions, reflections, and new artmaking practices.

The collections include original artworks from her younger self and one of her students, master copies of those original artworks, and a culminating wall collage inspired by those previous works. The artist experienced feelings of complexity, nostalgia, and even humor when creating the artwork; the collections brought out the inner-child within her, and she hopes that it can do the same for her audience.

Noah Kohl

Art has the power to bring us to the same “place” as significant spiritual events and practices in our lives. Some examples of these events include meditation, prayer, near-death experiences, and more. During meditation, we can tap into a state of mind that allows ourselves to exist purely without judgment or ego. There are many potential benefits to visiting this place, such as reducing anxiety, increasing empathy, and enhancing creativity.

Similar to meditation, art also allows us to visit this metaphysical place. It enables us to get lost in wonder, awe, and the present moment within our minds. I create intuitive acrylic paintings to visually describe this internal landscape. My work acts as a bridge between painting, meditation, thought processes, and the spiritual experience. My goal is to create an aesthetically balanced experience for the viewer that entrances them in a similar state to when I create the works.

When the viewer experiences my work, I am inviting them into my own mind, allowing room for whatever is needed. This could be a sense of contemplation, wonder, speculation, confusion, or even complete stillness. Using fluid forms, expressive color, and visual motifs, I present my own mind’s eye through visual storytelling. By doing this, my work empowers the viewer to cultivate more moments of wonder and presence in their lives.

Lainey Schwaner

Art serves as a bridge to guide us toward a better understanding of ourselves and each other. The process of creating screen-printed monotypes is meditative and cathartic to me, allowing me to be emotionally present by tapping into my subconscious mind. In reflections, recollections I am interested in exploring color and form through process-based, intuitive mark-making and automatic gesture drawing techniques. This allows me to understand the duality of relationships within the mind/body connection. The act of engaging in a repetitive practice allows me the space to express, process, and understand my thoughts and emotions on a deeper level. By utilizing color, form, and scale on each piece, I am able to visually communicate specific feelings and thoughts that I have. This mode of communication stems from my subconscious and allows the viewer to step into my mind.

Each piece from the visual puzzle is intertwined and captures a record regarding the turbulence of a person’s inner experience in this world. My hope is that viewers will spend some time with the work, meditate, drink water, and be with themselves in the space for a few minutes.