BY ELIZABETH COLLINS and SYDNEY BEVERIDGE

In print | Published May 1, 2003

Adrienne Bayton ’03

In the new List Gallery show, Adrienne Bayton ’03 exhibits a series of figurative oil paintings depicting urban landscapes and her experiments with cutout collage. In a variation on traditional oil painting, her pieces “represent imaginative juxtapositions of past and present, conveyed through the use of saturated color, bold brush stroke and crude texture.” Her work blends old photographs and collages with the “vivid present” of painting.

To find her own voice as a painter, Bayton focused her thesis on this reconciliation of media, traditions and time periods. She said of her experience as an artist, “I like the idea that painting and art are not necessarily innate forms of expression, but — like a second language — have to be struggled with and manipulated to achieve a kind of fluency that is a kind of myth in itself.” Experiments with the medium of painting enabled Bayton to express herself through vibrant reinterpretations of landscapes and collages.

Naomi Baumol ’03

As an art major, Naomi Baumol ’03 has been eating, sleeping and living art for the last four years. And, because she is a senior, all of her Swarthmore art department eating, sleeping and living will culminate in an exhibition this week.

Baumol’s exhibit consists solely of color photographs. “I chose these specific pieces because I was interested in the way color and light work in photographs in dark settings,” Baumol said.

Color photography was not the medium Baumol assumed she would display in her senior art thesis show. In fact, Baumol did not discover the medium of color photography until last semester during a digital darkroom class.

“It wasn’t until I took the digital darkroom class that I realized that my main artistic interest lay in colors and textures more than composition and shapes, which is where I previously thought my interests lay,” she said.

“In my artistic explorations,” Baumol said, " I have found myself concentrating more on medium than exclusively on content. I spent most of my time here at Swarthmore experimenting with and rejecting different mediums."

Adena Killian ’03

In a collection of multi-medium sculpture, Adena Killian ’03 combined three-dimensional sculpture with two-dimensional text and images. Her work brings found objects and book forms together to create a visual narrative. Killian used chemistry test tubes, plastic tubing, plaster, wood, liquid latex and other materials in her art.

“The construction of sculpture from everyday things and found objects is really a sort of magical transformation of the ordinary. Even the most ordinary things, like the latex or plastic tubing that I used in several of my pieces, are read differently by the viewer once they are joined into a new whole with new meaning,” Killian said of the process.

Killian incorporates printed text into her pieces to mediate sculptural objects. She explained the relationship between the written and the physical. “I based my work on the idea that sculpture can be used as a potential book form, a place where text and imagery can interact with form,” she said. This exploration allowed Killian to integrate pieces of literature into her own works through “fundamentally playful” techniques of sculpture, molds and bookbinding.

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