Exhibition showcases works by graduating fine art students

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The obsession with sugar, redefining gender, and navigating difficult transitions in life — these are the subjects explored by three graduating students in the Department of Art’s Bachelor of Fine Arts Exhibition.

The exhibit is on display in the Center for the Visual Arts Gallery on UT’s Toledo Museum of Art Campus through Saturday, May 14.

In her research and artistic production, Hannah Lehmann explores the history of the sugar industry and the effects of our dependence upon it. Utilizing a variety of media and working across two- and three-dimensional formats, including figure drawing, ceramics and printmaking, she creates juxtapositions of alluring and repulsive images, objects, textures and colors that comment upon the contradictions embedded in our culture’s obsession with sweetness. The resulting artworks — both visually stunning and conceptually complex — ask the viewer to contemplate the relationships between decadence and decay, richness and rot, leisure and labor.

Evaleigh Stroud’s artwork examines the slippery constructions of the presumed opposites feminine and masculine. Employing stereotypically gendered forms and techniques, including guns and crochet, Stroud, like Lehmann, creates enlightening juxtapositions. Stroud’s creations reflect, in part, her experiences with endometriosis, a painful condition that often causes infertility. Since femininity traditionally has been associated with fertility, Stroud said she approaches her work as an extension of her struggle with bodily limits and an attempt to renegotiate the definitions of gender. The resulting objects and installations in the exhibition achieve an expressive effect that is simultaneously raw and delicate, bold and vulnerable, masculine and feminine, universal and personal.

Michele Sanderson utilizes portraiture and self-portraiture to explore moments of difficult transitions in her life and the lives of others. A skilled draftsperson and printmaker, Sanderson mixes a number of traditional techniques in innovative ways to create intimate work, including several wall drawings and installations, which testify to the human capacity for perseverance in the face of hardship and empathy in the face of indifference. Sanderson said she spends considerable time conversing and building trust with her subjects before depicting them; through her subject matter, process and formal choices, she explores the webs of relationships among the viewer, the artist, her subjects and the art itself.

The gallery is open Monday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

For more information on the free, public exhibition, visit the UT Department of Art at www.utoledo.edu/as/art or contact the UT Department of Art at 419.530.8300.