Students blend the rules in a new art exhibit

The brand-new exhibitions now available in the smaller art galleries in the Chase Fine Arts Center are chock full of pieces made exclusively by the students at USU — and are now featuring a wide swath of talent as the Graduate and Undergraduate Exhibitions have been installed. 

Madeline Williams’ piece, “Missing You,” made in 2021.

“This is definitely one of my favorite ones,” said gallery monitor Katherine Spencer. “Coming in this morning, I saw it for the first time and I was, like, blown away with the quality of the work here.”

Spencer is a junior studying Human Experience Design and Interaction (“It’s basically just web design,” she said), but has been impressed with the sheer physical magnitude of some of the pieces submitted by USU students. She pointed out several she was struck by, the least of which was a giant citrine stone carving placed near her desk.

“I would love to see how the artist made that,” she said. 

The exhibition features projects across all mediums, from stark oil paintings to intricate art prints, to stoneware sculpted out of wood. According to its event advertisement, “these students represent all the Art + Design disciplines, including ceramics, drawing & painting, printmaking, sculpture, art education, photography, Interior Architecture + Design, and Graphic Design.”

Amanda Joy-Petersen’s sculpture titled Statis Altered, made in 2021. Bailey Rigby.

Senior Carrie Richardson submitted several pieces for consideration, the crown jewel of which is a wedding dress that has a beautiful drawing (that was done all completely by hand) on its train.

 “This was a project for a class and it was supposed to showcase how to draw on not normal material,” she said. “like looking outside of just paper.”

Richardson says she felt inspired to work on a wedding dress train because she “felt like that was kind of the perfect space” for her vision. 

She then went searching for her subject. Richardson took pictures all over town but settled on a more rural scene.

“I decided I liked the image of this dirt road that had a dead-end sign next to it,” she said. “I thought it was an interesting social commentary about how a lot of people, like,  feel about marriage and weddings, especially nowadays. I thought it would be a fun kind of social experiment piece.” 

Olivia Roundy, a junior studying drawing and painting, submitted two art prints from her class on printmaking.

When debating which of her pieces to submit, she said, “I went through all of my pieces, and I wanted to do something recent, so I just went through all of my pieces from the semester that I had done that I really liked.”

Roundy feels really grateful the Logan USU campus had the space, resources, and hours for her projects that she might not otherwise have at home.

“I like to use the studios here normally, especially for my printmaking projects. Usually, I would come in, like, after classes to work on my prints,” she said.

Roundy said she spent at least 30 hours on her submissions. 

The Undergraduate and Graduate Exhibition will be on display in the Tippetts and Eccles Galleries in the Fine Arts Center from now until Nov 12.