PHOTO: Artist Marcela Crawford with her wheat-pasted murals “The Storm,” “Peacock,” and “Dragon Lady,” installed on the exterior walls of UMA’s Jewett Hall. (Submitted photo)
AUGUSTA — Recently graduated art students at the University of Maine at Augusta who exhibited their works in an all-online Virtual Senior Thesis Exhibition in May will now exhibit their senior thesis projects on the Danforth Gallery’s walls.
The five artists, Marcea Crawford, Shana Rowe Jackson, Evan Lord Martin, Jenn Messier and Becky Pass spent months preparing their thesis projects, first in UMA’s studios, and then in their home studios as campus access was limited because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In recognition of the challenging times in which their exhibition has taken place virtually and in-person, they have titled their exhibition “Phantasmagoria,” which means “a sequence of real or imaginary images like those seen in a dream.” In its transition from virtual to actual space, the exhibition marks not only the accomplishment of the artists whose works it exhibits, but the strange passage between the real and dreamlike that has attended much of the COVID era.
The works, forged from the artists’ individual experiences, artistic training, and many hundreds of hours of work in the studio, showed, in the spring, how this year’s graduates turned difficulty to art. Now viewable in person, Phantasmagoria transforms these artists’ visions from virtual to real.
“Phantasmagoria: 2020 UMA Senior Thesis Exhibition” is on view in the Danforth Gallery in UMA’s Jewett Hall through Oct. 2. The gallery is open from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday. Face coverings are required, as is physical distance of six feet between people.
