The end of the semester at SUNY Oswego brings the stresses of compulsory final exams and presentations; for Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) students, the last hurdle of anxiety comes with the BFA exhibit, where their work is displayed to the student body.

“There’s a lot of anxiety and it was stressful, but I’m glad how it turned out and I got a lot of good pieces that I’m proud of,” Daniel Griffin, a senior BFA student, said.

 One of the major requirements to graduate is to create a body of work representing all they have learned over the four years. This is a showcase of their best work and serves as a visual thesis. The exhibition started on April 9 and will end April 21. The gallery is open from Tuesday to Friday from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

When you enter you are bombarded by a variety of styles and disciplines, including paintings, photography, screen printing, sculpture, animation and much more. There are fictional brand mockups, such as “Terreria,” a fictional music concert venue with a 3D mock-up by Belle Lamere. Paul Cwika stamped his name incrementally revealing a red monochromatic painting. Kevin Pham created professional colorful portrait photography. Some artists have products for sale, like postcards, stickers, comics and more.

With each section in the gallery, there is a photo with a biography and an artist statement about where they came from, their major and what they value as artists. Statements range from life after college to artist inspiration, self-reflection and internal strife. A common throughline would be the variety of mediums each artist can use. 

“I think it’s necessary to understand different mediums,” Griffin said. “Honestly, I think that if you don’t try something one time, it’s really hard to understand your contemporary artists… I think hybridizing or trying new things is so necessary to both making yourself stand out as an artist but also rounding yourself out as a person.”

Griffin described himself as a “jack of all trades” since he has a multimedia approach to illustration and has been incorporating 3D modeling as well, and interns as a Graphic Designer at the Office of Sustainability. Themes of internal homophobia are present in his comic illustrations. 

“Personally, as someone who [was] raised Christian and saw [being gay] as a sin, [it is] why I was using imagery of lambs [to embrace] the monster,” Griffin said. “It was me coming to terms with being gay and appreciating part of myself.”

The BFA class was created by the department several years ago because students needed to prepare for the exhibition on top of their other classes. It helped mediate the stressors and kept them on track. Right now the first half of the class, 16 of them are presenting; and in a few weeks, 15 more students will present. 

“This one went really smooth, smoother than I’ve ever seen it go before,” Cara Thompson, the student-faculty advisor and head of the BFA exhibit, said. “The students did what they needed to do. We spent all semester doing wall plans and floor plans, making labels and writing bios and statements. There’s a lot of moving parts but they did a great job this semester.”

A lot of work has been dedicated to the BFA exhibition including designing the look and feel of the posters and catalog. 

Photo by: Nate Sprenger