PODCAST:

Ruffin Hall is hosting fourth year thesis exhibitions starting this week through April 24.

TRANSCRIPT:

Ella Powell: 

Ruffin Hall is hosting fourth year thesis exhibitions starting this week through April 24, for the first show in Ruffin Gallery. UVA, fifth year Anspaugh fellows Chloe Claiborne and Luke Logan, along with fourth year DMP student Adele Chang Park, present Through a Starving Sieve. For Arts This Week, I spoke with Luke Logan.

Luke Logan: 

I’m Luke Logan, and I am a fifth year Anspaugh Fellow at UVA right now. I graduated in the year of 2025, with a degree in studio art, specifically printmaking and art history. With the Anspaugh program, I’m able to audit classes, and we have weekly meetings with fourth year DMP students, where we do a lot of intellectual farming, sharing ideas, and that’s been really helpful for me. And along with the access to all of the materials, especially with printmaking, those are extremely hard to have access to. Upcoming is going to be all of the shows for the fourth-year art majors. There will be the exhibitions for the DMP and Anspaugh cohort, which will be done jointly in the Ruffin Gallery. So upcoming Monday, March 30, the first week will open, and that will be my show that I’m doing along with two other artists, Adele Chang Park and Chloe Clayborne, they’re really awesome, and we’ve had a lot of fun trying to work out how to do a group show. This is something that we haven’t really done before, and it’s been confusing, but also very fun trying to figure out how much curation to do, but also how much new creation to do at the same time, so lots of negotiation, and I think we’ve gotten into like, a bit of a mind meld to prepare for the show. We all traveled to Calvert Cliffs, on one of the fingers of Maryland, and it’s just a beach with just a bunch of fossils, and Adele does beach photography, and Chloe grabbing shells and using them in her upcoming work. So that was a really fun journey that we did, and I think we’re all super excited, but still a little bit apprehensive about putting everything up, especially, there’s this huge show that is up in the gallery right now that they have to wipe out before we get in there.

Ella Powell: 

So what is the range of mediums that y’all are including in this show?

Luke Logan: 

It’s gonna be fairly wide, because each of us has a fairly different like principal practice. So Adele does large format photography. She’s one of the only people who is doing photo super diligently and professionally at UVA at this level. So definitely gonna be photography. She’s doing up nice frames and everything. It’s gonna be printed pretty huge, I think maybe, like, six feet tall. In contrast, Chloe has a bunch of really, like, beautiful paintings that are very like washy, and these are oil paintings. And then she’s also going to be presenting a bunch of ceramic works as well. Some of those will involve the shell imprints, shell inspiration. She’s very interested in, like the idea of this rack line on the beach that holds all of the washed up, lost items that can come together. And in a way, I’m trying to represent that in a piece that I’m doing, which is sort of an assemblage of found objects, like all strung together on a pallet from the side of the road, but the rest of my works are mostly going to be prints on paper. But up until we put everything together and we all get together and see what we can do with the space, I think there’s still things yet to be decided.

Ella Powell: 

So what specific types of prints are you bringing to this show?

Luke Logan: 

So I’ve been focusing on a couple different types of printmaking over my years at UVA. More specifically, in the last couple years, I’ve been really interested in stone lithography. It’s a crazy, really old technique using fossilized limestone and a bunch of acid and a step by step process. It’s funny, my professor always will mention the limestone, like, has memory, or it gets cold and it’s so easy to personify the stone. And that’s something that I feel like I’ve been finding myself doing over and over again, where I’m like, Ah, this precious thing. I need to figure out how to preserve it or make it cooler or weirder, or, like, dirtier. It’s my favorite type of print that I’m bringing to the show. But I’m also doing a couple other prints that are intaglio style, and that is, prints that are taken from metal plates that are chemically etched with an image into the surface. And the way that we’re able to get an image off of there onto a piece of paper is you wet the paper, and it sort of leaves an embossment as you remove the paper, and you can see the actual texture of the surface of the metal plate that you used. So that’s another style that I’ve got to be bringing, and a technique that I learned this past year with my professor, Akemi Ohira will. Was viscosity, or simultaneous printing, where you roll all the colors onto the plate at the same time, but you alter the viscosity of each color so that they lay in a very predictable way, or sometimes unpredictable. It provides, like, a really cool look where there’s a lot of like color mixing done on its own. There’s a bit of surrendering yourself to the process in that way, which I like a lot. I feel like there’s a lot of that in printmaking when you work with machines and when you work with chance like that.

Ella Powell: 

I think it’s cool, like the lithograph or the, you know, the limestone, it literally is a fossil itself. And then your show kind of has this whole motif of like showcasing nature in this way, I want to ask about the title that you all have chosen for this exhibit through a starving sieve.

Luke Logan: 

Yeah, we had some fun, some difficulty coming up with the title together. Again, this is something that we have to negotiate and all agree on, and think that it’s something that encapsulates all of our work. So we were thinking for a while. We had a couple words that were cycling through our minds. We were talking about winnowing and snipes. And the snipe came from this, like idea of the snipe hunt, which is sort of a futile search for something that doesn’t really exist. And so that was sort of where we started off. And then we were thinking about winnowing, which is a sound that the snipes make in real life, because they are real words, and there’s some interesting etymology with that word. And we were getting kind of deep into that and having some fun. And then we were getting into the idea of threshing. Threshing is essentially siphoning grain. You’re keeping one thing that is useful and discarding something else that is not. We wanted to focus on the search and maybe coming to some understanding, with discomfort and not understanding what we’re actually looking for. Came to this title where we wanted this sieve that is sort of siphoning material or sediment or anything. Honestly, we’re pushing it all through, see what stays, see what goes through. We thought that it sort of encapsulated a bit of the idea of looking for something without having an exact end goal, or without really knowing what you’re looking for and being okay with that. In the way that we’re choosing to display the work, we’re sort of hoping to sort of scatter things around the gallery and just have people wander around and take in what they want.

Ella Powell: 

Yeah. So this is the first week of the fourth year thesis shows and on SPA fellow exhibits. How long are all the exhibits being shown over? How many weeks?

Luke Logan: 

Yes, so there will be four weeks of thesis exhibitions, starting on Monday, March 30, each exhibition will be up for the week. The gallery is open from nine to 5pm and it will be up until the following Friday, which was April 3. There will be a closing reception on April 3, from 5pm to 7pm this is all located in Ruffin gallery or Ruffin Hall parking is available at Culbreth parking lot, but we have three succeeding weeks after the first week and the last day of shows and the last closing reception will be on April 24 but each show is open for only five days, so you got to make sure you come out and see it. I’m really excited about the work we’ve done, and I’m also really excited for everyone to come and see what we’ve all been working on over the last academic year.

Ella Powell: 

Come out to Ruffin gallery to see Through a Starving Sieve on display with a closing reception from five to seven pm on Friday, April, 3. Other art from UVA fourth-years and Anspaugh fellows will be on display throughout Ruffin Hall from now until the final closing reception on April 24. Arts This Week is supported by the UVA Arts Council and Piedmont Virginia Community College. PVCC Arts presents a rich array of dance, music, theater and visual arts programming. Learn more pvcc.edu. For WTJU, I’m Ella Powell.