Tabitha L. Andrews ’23
Staff Writer
Located in Durand Hall at Lake Forest College is an art exhibition featuring works by students. My first impression of the pieces reminded me of the critical role art plays as a means of communication. Each work contained its own lineage of creation: they told a story of challenging work and dedication to unraveling a deeper meaning of expression and human experience. Three students told me more about their artworks.
Belinda Beaver ’22 is a senior English major who is double minoring in print and digital publishing and digital media design. Beaver will graduate this May. Many of her pieces were presented at the student art exhibitions, each picturing the challenging work and dedication she contributed to the art department this year.
We specifically discussed her work on an editorial design for a skin-care company based on being more sustainable through natural ingredients. She said that her creative process began with a general idea of what she wanted to create “and, naturally, it ended up completely different from that.”
Beaver said: “Everything in the collage I individually cut out from different images in Photoshop, and all of the link text was in shaped boxes I had to create.”
Although the process was a long endeavor, Beaver did an outstanding job of communicating the company’s soul by natural entities such as flowers and leaves. She has been drawn to the arts her whole life and has learned through her practice that “[i]f you stick with it and don’t give up, the outcome will be good even though it was a challenge to get done.”
Rising junior Matthew Carey ’24 created a graphic design on the escapism of mundanity in everyday life. Carey is a communications major with a double minor in cinema studies and business. He has dabbled with the arts his whole life, beginning with performance arts, and now moving toward digital art at Lake Forest College.
“So, part of this assignment that I made this art piece for was a collage assignment in the style of an established artist; I chose Jesse Treece. I did a lot of research on the artist and then manipulated my images to create something reminiscent of his work,” he said.
Carey was inspired by the work of Jesse Treece and a shared love for National Geographic and Vintage magazines. He used images from National Geographic in his piece, including landscape photography and images of human interaction.
“I wanted to express that feeling of mundanity in everyday life and how you can escape that, seen in my work as an idea of a daydream: an epic quest where this man is looking out over a balcony at this bizarre and surreal scene,” Carey said. “Creating the story element was important to me: I want people to be able to feel like they just got lost in this crazy daydream.”
When viewing the work, you feel just that—lost in the daydream of a romantically captivating world.
Established artist Dima Zaghal ’23, a rising senior majoring in studio art, created her signature piece, In Motion. The piece was designed as a wooden structure to be used as a base for an assortment of colors of yarn that Zaghal continuously wrapped around it.
It started as an assignment for a sculpture class but transformed into one of Zaghal’s most significant pieces: “This is not a work of art that is finished, but it is a work of art in progress that I want to continue working [on]and creating.”
I got a chance to be a part of this collaborative experience, and it is just that, a work in motion. In helping Zaghal during her performance at the art exhibitions, I somehow ended up entwined in the piece itself. Being wrapped up in yarn was such a comforting and childlike feeling.
“This work in progress is a visual of my and our ongoing odyssey of existence. Life is a recipe of mess, chaos, imbalance, and order. I wrap yarn to display the ease of getting caught up in the strings of life’s situations, whether internal or external,” Zaghal said.
She continued, “At times, our entanglement with chaos is deliberate and purposeful—with this, I intentionally wrap my body alongside the tower of yarn. Life is a play of chance and exploration. No one knows where or what ‘next’ is, yet we each show up every day as active participants.”
