The Glass Gallery, inside the Fox Fine Arts building, gives students an opportunity to showcase their artwork every year. The exhibitions usually run one to two weeks, giving the artist an option to host either an opening or closing reception in which the public can attend, view the artwork on display and meet and greet the artist.
The Glass Gallery serves as an exhibition space for student work including media and features, the gallery holds approximately eight exhibitions every semester.
Senior and studio art major Leah Powell held an opening reception for her egg-themed solo exhibition, “Eggscellent,” Feb. 27.
Powell, whose concentration is drawing, has been developing her style as an artist for the last couple of years, under the guidance of Professor Therese “Terri” Bauer.
Powell wore a yellow dress along with a handmade egg pin in her hair at the reception to go along with the egg-themed exhibition said it all started out as a zine.
“The reason that I used eggs is because I was actually obsessed with them back in the day when I first started taking drawing classes. I became known as the ‘Egg Girl’ and so I kind of took it as my own branding,” Powell said. “It grew from there, from deepening the complexity to the conceptual nature of it.”
The “Eggscellent” reception featured an interactive activity with the artist where the public could create their own scenes using various drawings of characters and objects with magnets attached to the back, that they could place in a metal background, following hand-picked prompts provided by the artist.
“All of the characters have started from either a relationship I had with someone or another person entirely and they’ve evolved to be something more,” Powell said. “They’re all connected to me.”
Powell included a self-made gift shop in the section behind the scenes, where she hung paintings, drawings and glass-bottle necklaces where attendees could choose from. After picking out a gift, the visitors were required to go to the table where the artist was seated and she would take a picture with a Polaroid camera of their hands, holding the gift.
“These are sort of my receipts,” Powell said, as she plans to use these photographs for her next in-class critique. “I needed to have this show because it’s interactive and in a classroom critique space, there’s not really the opportunity for that just because of time and because you have to share the space with other people which can make it a little more difficult when you need to see people’s reactions to it.”
Powell was asked what she thought of the aftermath of her exhibition.“It’s met me right in the middle, which I think was really good for me,” she said. “I think the best experiences were the connections that I was able to get with people when I did take their picture or when I went out there and played a game with some of the people that were there. That was probably the best expressions of my concept and my vision for the show – the connection there.”
Powell is planning to exhibit for a second time the week after finals this semester, where she will make a couple of changes and add new artwork. The upcoming exhibition at the UTEP Glass Gallery, “Tómame: Solo Exhibition” by Claudia Ramirez beginning March 4 and will run until March 8.
