By Prisca Kim 

kimprisc@grinnell.edu

From November 5 to November 9, the Smith Gallery featured artwork from students taking Hybrid Media, a studio art seminar. Kamila Berkalieva ’13, Lauren Caskey ’13, Matt Mertes ’12.5 and Christopher Squier ’13 created pieces for a mid-semester exhibition.

Caskey’s work, titled Lines Through Definition: A Drawing Series, is a collection of about twenty hand-drawn, black and white drawings, created with pigment liner on paper. Intricately detailed, the drawings included in a host of geometric shapes.

The drawings were influenced by Mandalas, which are traditional Buddhist drawings.

“I was drawn to them because of the detail and beauty of such beautiful things, and the time it took to do them,” Caskey said. “When I originally started, I had a few simple motifs that I [repeated]. As I created more of them, I built upon them and discovered more things. For me, these drawings are very intimate and personal.”

Showcasing her art on a television monitor, Berkalieva created a piece using linoleum animation, sometimes referred to as linomation. This animation, titled Ingression, was made up of digital images that show the development of a full drawing, slowly revealing bits and pieces one at a time.

“Linomation is actually pretty rare, not a lot of people do it, [and] that was my preferred medium,” Berkalieva said.

Her creation had a very mysterious factor to it—the fullness of the piece is not apparent until the end of the video. According to Berkalieva, the viewer should see that only the inside of the room, a private place, is changing, thus highlighting the difference between exterior and interior.

“Linomation is such a lengthy process… I wanted the viewer to see that, so I wanted the process to be evident in the piece,” Berkalieva said. “There is almost a psychological component to the piece because there are a few seconds where you do not know what is going to appear on the screen.”

Mertes’s part of the exhibition, Abstract Series, was made up of four different digital paintings that incorporated a variety of vivid colors and different line structures. Each image was completely different from the others in its color scheme and line pattern.

Squier, Arts Editor for the Scarlet & Black, used a variety of media in his work, Language Prototypes. His art showed various three dimensional designs with burlap pieces hanging from the wall. Some burlap pieces were strung together with wire, others held up by wood blocks, and many pieces hung directly from the wall. Spread out across the wall, the piece displayed many patterns and different colors in burlap sections.

“What I thought was really interesting was that [the artists] all used line through different media and through different creative methods. I like that they took [it] in a lot of different directions, but everything was still unified by line,” said Hannah Brown ’16, viewing the exhibit.