Capstone 2022

We don’t want to reiterate two years’ worth of pandemic-related conversation about making art in these “unprecedented times,” but it’s impossible to completely ignore. We’d be lying if we said this time didn’t impact our art now; we spent a year apart, unable to share ideas effectively, sentenced to our screens. We were nearly incapable of truly listening to one another and giving insightful critiques when our minds were occupied with fearing for the lives of ourselves and the people we care about, many of the facets of who we were diffused away. With the world being in such a state of chaos, there were plenty of things that seemed more important than creating art.

But that’s just it. Creating art is what we do.

This capstone show is the culmination of the collective, complex feelings of loss, growth, and change that we’ve found ourselves steeped in over the past semester. Student loans may be creeping their heads around the corner, our resumes continually being reprinted for a new job prospect, but for some golden and sparkly reason, art still stands. We continually return to our shared love for expressing and understanding ourselves and the world. Now, as seniors, we’ve resumed the conversations we started sophomore year, when we were blissfully unaware of the upcoming dangers of the future world. We’ve reinterpreted what it means to be “in-person,” how it feels to reconnect after time lost. We’ve sat in circles, asked for help, and provided listening ears to these people we’ve had the pleasure to call friends for the last four years. We share this unique experience of being in a major that is complicated and sorta funky, but that’s why we like it. We make jokes about how future job interviews will go, when the employer will no doubt ask, “So, what’s your major again?” and we falter our way through a half-complete description of the term “interdisciplinary.” And while it’s easy to make these jokes, to wallow in our collective self-pity and use referential humor as a means to cope, we’d like to think this shared, weird, mixed-up four years has contributed to the deep thaw we find ourselves in.

Creative Media BFA Capstone 2022 Faculty
Erik Esckilsen
Al Larsen