Herron School of Art and Design Painting Thesis exhibition featuring: Chase Palmer, Tillman Reyes, Genevieve St. Arnaud, Lydia Crouse and Tom Day.

About Lydia Crouse
Crouse describes her work as “a romanticized collision of my honest identity—an individualized American woman— with elements from our glorified popular culture. All the while embracing my own naiveté, experience, and passion with skepticism and humor.”

About Tom Day
Day’s work centers around culture and bridging societal gaps through portraiture. “I paint people in attempt to learn about other cultures, but mostly to understand them,” says Day. ” Although there are many social divides in the world, I’m wanting to convey a sense of togetherness and equality of the human race.”

About Chase Palmer
“Today, we are more frequently exposed to a multitude of imagery than ever before,” says Palmer. “We are surfing the internet, looking at the social media postings of our friends and even strangers, and taking photographs on our phones. While looking at so much imagery on the internet, we are unconsciously reading more frequently than any other previous culture. We do this while working, commuting, socializing, or lounging at home, and while munching on conveniently obtained artificially flavored junk foods that are slowly suffocating our disgusting arteries.”

Palmer’s dilemma as a young contemporary artist is how does he accurately reflect this culture? His answer: Paint it all at once. “In my work, I assault the space with an over-construction of activity made up of various painterly inventions that come from improvised intuition. All of this comes from a process that is completely automatic and improvised,” says Palmer.

“The question of how to approach painting a figure is so shrouded in questions. Whenever I paint the figure in a traditional manner, I feel like a deadpan mechanical printer that has mastered the long-outdated technology of applying pigmented glue to canvas. I invent my own space that exists solely in the world of images. I layer these invented compositions over a more traditional subject in order to mimic augmented reality technology that is becoming more present in our smartphones, video games, and GPS technology. However, in my work, the digital does not replace reality, paint does.”

About Tillman Reyes
Reyes work serves as a “record” of a place in time. His paintings, installations, and sculptures highlight a seemingly insignificant event in everyday life, recreated in a gallery setting.

About Genevieve St. Arnaud
St. Arnaud’s artwork is an interpretation of her childhood through the perspective of a young woman finding her identity away from home. Her pallet is warm and inviting to characterize the optimism in youth with the use of color and texture to spark senses and emotions from childhood. She also incorporates non-traditional materials such as fabric, paper, thread and wire in the works to exemplify a feeling or place. “For example, patterned fabric can be soft and comforting, and remind me of home. Yet, wire can be aggressive and give a feeling of anxiety or edge. I use materials that serve as the base of many functioning objects to signify origin. I combined the paint and mixed materials to represent the push and pull between the past and present. Just as I remember these childhood moments in fragments, I apply mixed media in various parts,” says St Arnaud.

Process is important to her practice. “There is a self-discovery that occurs when I compare new and old materials. I use memorable stories, and photographs to inspire my collage-like paintings”, says St. Arnaud. “By combining my inspiration and materials I am able to transform a past moment. The moment becomes an understanding or vision of how I see it now.”

Symbolism also pervades her work to represent the innocence of childhood. These symbols at times are a stand in for important figures in her life. “Such as a strawberry signifying my mother. I merge my abstract collages with distinct imagery to recreate a scene or memory,” says St Arnaud. She invites the audience to be a part of her stories so they can understand the growth she’s made in discovering her authentic identity since leaving home. “When I revisit a memory I find that not only has my view of the memory transformed, but also so have I.”