Vivian Spencer next to her piece, Loteria. Photo By: Brianne Kuhnhausen
By: Alexis Lugo
On Thursday, November 14, 2013, Pensacola State hosted an artists’ reception from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Anna Lamar Switzer Center for Visual Arts Gallery, Building 15, on the Pensacola campus.
This annual exhibition features some of the recent pieces by PSC’s art faculty and displays a variety of artwork including ceramics, drawing, digital imaging, graphic design, jewelry, painting, photography, video, and sculpture.
Viewers were awestruck when they spoke with the artists and discovered how much time and effort they put into creating such imaginative works of art.
Barbie Koha, a PSC student, had a few comments about Sam Nettles’ acrylic painting, Fetish of the Artist as Transcendent Being.
“This is a rather interesting piece. I like how it’s a head, but it has more figures inside the piece,” said Koha. “When I look at it, it’s like every part of a person; every emotion and every personality of a person. This picture is showing all of that,” said Koha’s friend, Kim Cu.
Visual Arts Gallery Director, Vivian Spencer, displayed two photography pieces that represent Lotería, a Mexican bingo card.
“I’ve been fascinated with the artist Frida Kahlo. She was a Mexican artist back in the early turn of last century. Her views were very extreme and radical,” said Spencer. “She is a very fascinating historical figure as well as a very strong female artist.”
To begin her piece, Spencer gathered yards of fabric and pinned them to the wall in a way that they appeared to be dresses. She then surrounded the fabric with flowers and butterflies and objects that were reflective of Kahlo’s paintings.
“I have this whole series of Frida Kahlo with different dresses and different objects,” said Spencer. “When I was in San Antonio, Texas I saw this beautiful, colorful, flat imagery in restaurants and museums and all over town, so I asked what they were. They were images from Lotería, which is Mexican bingo”
These Lotería bingo cards are a learning tool for children. Instead of a traditional bingo card filled with numbers, they have images. This is how children learned to speak and recognize various objects.
“I photographed those images and pieced them together with my Frida pictures to make my own Lotería card.” The photography pieces titled Lotería de Kahlo #1 and Lotería de Kahlo #2 were Spencer’s rendition of a Lotería card.
Each panel is made up of nine different pictures that Spencer sewed together. The diagonal pictures that form an ‘X’ are Spencer’s pictures and the four that surround them are the Lotería pictures. Both panels, however, are speaking very specific narratives.
“The panel on the left is all about sound. When you look at it, you can read the imagery as sound,” Spencer described. “The second one is a little bit more complicated. Images are different things to different cultures. The second one is about transformations: personal, spiritual, physical. It’s about human transformation. ”
The PSC Faculty Art show will be up in building 15 for any viewers to see.
