Published 2012-04-14T00:05:00Z”/>
Miguel Rocha
Monsters, mailboxes, an old Apple desktop computer frame and a female pirate transformed Ayres Hall into a display hall Tuesday.
Fine arts students exposed their work for other students’ appreciation, as paintings laid flat against the white walls, some realistic and some not so much, captured the attention of the attendees.
Life-sized cutout paintings of incubus and succubus monsters created by Kellen Dyer covered the walls in one of the rooms. The bluish face and orange eyes of the incubus stared creepily at a sleeping human to describe sleep paralysis.
Dyer, a senior fine arts major, focused on sleep paralysis because he found that 30 percent of the population experiences it, and the most common form of it is the feeling that someone or something is pushing on the chest, he said.
One of his paintings portrayed a nude model lying with her hands outstretched with the incubus pushing down on her chest on top of her.
He would have ideally had a month to work on each painting, but time constraints of school left him with about a week to work on each, he said.
“Sometimes you got to just be here all day and just work forever,” he said.
Dyer used acrylic paint in his work for its flexibility and ability to dry quickly, he said. He has little experience with oil paints but because his paintings would crack with oil, acrylic works best.
Amanda Swede, a senior fine arts major, took a different approach for her exposition. She photographed mailboxes, but these were not ordinary mailboxes. They varied in shape from scaled houses, tractors, trains, a pink flamingo, a fish mailbox and even an Oakland Raiders helmet mailbox.
Swede finds it interesting that people took their time to sculpt them, she said.
“Not too many people actually really take a look at them,” Swede said.
She displayed a year’s worth of work. Half of her photographs were from Chico and San Luis Obispo, while the flamingo mailbox, one of her favorites, was from Santa Cruz.
“They are just so odd,” Swede said.
Taking a more digital approach with his art exposition was Terrence Scoville, a senior fine arts major with an electronic arts option.
Scoville grew up with technology, so he likes to experiment with it, he said. He enjoys discovering how technology affects people’s perceptions and sense of reality while doing things humans can’t.
His attention-grabbing piece of technological art was a screen helmet. It was an old, empty Apple desktop frame used as a mask with an iPad attached as a screen.
“It’s kind of disorienting because you can only see through a small hole,” Scoville said in reference to the floppy disk dock. “It’s kind of hard to be in there for a while.”
Brianne Hughes, a senior fine arts major, displayed her fantasy artistic work.
Her illustrations depicted character design in the areas they live in and the environments they participate in, she said.
Hughes’ work is mostly computer-based, but she also does some pencil drawing ahead of time, she said.
Bethany Castillo, a senior health science major, was attracted by the music playing at the event when she decided to stop by, she said. Castillo was surprised by the artwork.
“There are a lot of good artists at this school,” she said.
Castillo didn’t realize Chico State had such a fantastic art department, she said.
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<strong>Miguel Rocha can be reached at</strong>
<em>[email protected]</em>
