Jeffrey Kazar, a friend of Stella Arbeláez Tascón, one of the exhibit’s featured MFA candidates, observes Arbeláez Tascón’s portrait of him hung near the entrance of the gallery. Kazar collected the materials that surround him in his portrait.
The atrium of UCF’s School of Visual Arts and Design was a bustle of activity as faculty members, students, friends and family breezed in and out of the gallery, passing compliments to the artists of the hour.
UCF SVAD held the opening reception for the new exhibit “Haunt” on Thursday at the UCF Art Gallery. “Haunt” showcases the thesis work of Studio Art and Design Master of Fine Arts candidates Stella Arbeláez Tascón, Brittani Brown and Janessa Douds.
The MFA cohort divided the gallery space to display their individual works, each artist circling back to a significant place to them in their work.
“The show is called Haunt because the works are things that we keep in our minds,” Arbeláez Tascón said. “It keeps haunting us, it keeps coming back, we keep going to these places in our minds.”
Arbeláez Tascón described that what haunts her is the Florida trails and her analogies of nature and mental health. Her fellow cohort members expressed the hauntings of a domestic setting, such as Brittani Brown’s exploration of growing up in the Panhandle. Arbeláez Tascón found that these “hauntings” are what connect her work with the works of the other MFA candidates.
“So, although we’re all very different, we all found a commonality and I couldn’t be happier to work with these girls,” Arbeláez Tascón said.
Arbeláez Tascón, a Colombian-born artist, combined print work, painting and sculpture design to express her journey through divorce and her personal evolution from seeing both wonders and devastations while hiking the Florida National Scenic Trail.
In one of her largest displays in the exhibit, two oil on canvas paintings were hung side by side.
“It’s called Ghost Forest because when I came out of the forest at that location, it was nothing but devastation,” Arbeláez Tascón said. “The land had been completely decimated in order to make room for a new building of luxury condominiums.”
For Arbeláez Tascón, she found that this destruction of natural land resonated with her in her memories of going there, but she couldn’t just hold onto that picture of devastation.
“So that image stayed with me for months and months, and now I was able to express it in the painting, but I didn’t want to leave it there,” Arbeláez Tascón said. “I wanted to come back with a positive, so the second part of that diptych was born. For that one, I actually went on the trail and I took the big old canvas to the trail and painted it partly plein-air, and it’s just what I imagine the way the land should be.”
At the far end of the gallery, Douds’ paintings displayed a vibrant exploration of the threshold between imagination and reality. Her paintings varied between depicting daytime and nighttime scenes with bold colors that captured the eyes of the reception’s attendees.
“Everyone is really obsessing over the colors, especially the fluorescent red, so that’s been really nice to hear,” Douds said. “I’m equally as excited over that color, so it’s really cool to see other people like that about it.”
While her exhibit was predominantly composed of paintings, Douds’s uncanny visuals exceeded their canvases and consumed the white spaces of the gallery walls. The placement of her work integrated with the natural layout of the gallery, incorporated elements like the gallery’s exit door as part of the display. Douds also had a vibrant portrait of a ceiling fan hung high near the gallery’s ceiling, the backside painted orange to illuminate on the wall and interact with the space.
Zach Kohl and Hailey Head, studio art sophomores, flip through the pages of MFA candidate Brittani Brown’s Bible piece. The Bible piece includes pages of the Bible with select words crossed out and certain verses highlighted as part of Brown’s storytelling.
Brown’s side of the exhibit largely explored her hometown and upbringing, paying tribute to her family members. Her thesis work included quilting, which Brown credited as an homage to the southern-style quilting her grandmothers would do. Photographs of what stood out about life in the Panhandle for her adorn the walls, viewers pointing out elements that they found familiarity in.
This collection of photographs, textiles and visuals highlighted the relevant aspects of her childhood and major impacts Brown’s family had on her.
“First of all, my nana is here and her house is in a lot of my photographs, and she kind of means the world to me as far as my experience of Southern representation goes,” Brown said, tearing up. “I was super nervous about her seeing it, but when she came to the gallery and saw it for the first time, she was kind of speechless. I thought she was going to be super mad…but she loved all of it, and she’s really been in love with it.”
Brown’s exploration of Southern culture also touched the hearts of others from outside of UCF’s community.
“There were some people here from South Carolina, and after looking around my work and seeing the Southern Baptist narrative one of them came up to me,” Brown said. “He said that it was very effective and that he could relate because he grew up in a similar way. He said it was very impactful for him, and that’s kind of the people that I’m making work for.”
Hailey Head, sophomore studio art major, and Iris Burnham, freshman emerging media major, view and photograph a quilt design by Brittani Brown, one of the exhibit’s featured MFA candidates. The quilting technique is derived from the Southern-style quilting Brown learned from her grandmothers.
The reception was filled with attendees complimenting the artists and taking photos both of and with the featured artworks.
“There are people who graduated last year and the year before, and it really means a lot,” Brown said. “I have made so many long-lasting friends from this program.”
“Haunt” will remain on display in the UCF Art Gallery until March 7, before the space begins preparing to house the spring 2025 BFA Exhibition.