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page 20 monday 5.5.2014
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Viz-a-GoGo showcases top visualization work Katie Canales
Tanner Garza — THE BATTALION
Viz-a-GoGo 21 displayed work from graduate and undergraduate visualization students this weekend.
The Battalion Paintings, photographs, stills from animated shorts, sculptures and more filled the Amity, a furniture restoration storefront, in Downtown Bryan this weekend for Texas A&M’s Visualization Department’s 21st annual Viz-a-GoGo. The project, traditionally run by graduate students, consists of receiving submitted art from graduate and some undergraduate students. Amy Richards, fine arts graduate student, said approximately 40 students had their art exhibited this weekend. Bill Jenks, visualization laboratory director, said his duty was to assist in the art displays. “The space is different,” Jenks said. “That means that the nature of the exhibit was sort of reinvented to fit the space better. And so we’ve modified some of our display techniques and other things. Plus the nature
of the work that the students are producing changes from year to year so the exhibit is different from last year.” One issue the Viz-a-GoGo coordinators face each year is finding a vacant venue in Downtown Bryan. Richard Davison, visualization professor, said the Amity was ideal for the kind of work being displayed. “This was the first year that we found this space, this Amity space, which was a furniture repair place way back in the old days and in the 20s and 30s it was a Buick dealership,” Davison said. “It’s this wonderful, big, raw space.” Richards said having Viz-a-GoGo offcampus on First Friday, when the downtown galleries remain open for longer periods of time, reaches a broader community. “So we have a lot of people from the Bryan-College Station community that come out and see the show and have no idea that we have this program here, so it’s really
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nice,” Richards said. “There’s lots of other events going on in Downtown Bryan since it’s First Friday, so that helps too because we get an even larger amount of people that attend the screening and the exhibition.” Both graduate and undergraduate work was displayed in the Amity, which hasn’t been the case in past years, Davison said. Katelyn Becker, a visualization graduate student whose art was exhibited in Viz-a-GoGo, said she is a part of a class that meshes art with science. In her computer animation course, Becker said she “scripts” objects so their movements can be controlled. Throughout the semester her scripted objects have become progressively more challenging. “I did a camel throughout the semester, so you start off with programming that movement and then actually rigging that animal, modelling it and then skinning it so that it moves with the skeleton,” Becker said. “And then you finish off the semester with an animation.” Becker said one of her pieces, a still from an animation based off concept sketches from Elsa in Disney’s “Frozen,” is a clear example of how much more difficult it is to create a female animation than it is to create a male animation. “It’s difficult to make them different,” Becker said. “I think with men there isn’t the expected type, so with all girls it’s expected for them to have the big eyes and the tiny nose, the full lips the fluffy hair. And with guys you can do a really exaggerated jaw, a big, bulbous nose. You can make more exaggerations that still feel normal. If you do that to a girl, she kind of becomes grotesque.” Jenks said it is because of a space like the Amity that allows for more modern types of art such as Becker’s work to be exhibited. “There’s more in here this year because the space is more conducive,” Jenks said. “It’s bigger and there’s more diversity of stuff.”
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