Jessie Gray holds one of her paintings, which will be showcased during the PCA&D Senior Art Show on Saturday.
Randy Haldeman holds his "Midnight Redemer" comic art.
Danielle Sheerin holds her documentary photography book, "Patrolling the Electric City."
Joe Pietrzak holds one of his graphic design illustrations on "The Art of Video Games" which will be featured in the PCA&D Senior Art Show this Saturday.
They are illustrators and printmakers, cartoonists and photographers, web designers and fine artists.
This spring, the students of the Class of 2012 at Pennsylvania College of Art & Design will graduate and go out into the world to transform what they have learned into viable careers in the arts. And on Saturday, the artists of PCA&D will present their Senior Show & Celebration. It's open to the public and free.
"Now that I'm graduating, I'm ready to get out there and be an artist. I've already got a job as an intern," says Joe Pietrzak, a graphic arts major, who is set to work for a local advertising agency and has been doing work as a freelancer.
Pietrzak designed the logo, posters, mailing pieces, website and other components of the Senior Show & Celebration. Using a soft grey and a vibrant work-area orange with bold black, his designs are clean and striking. The campaign also shows an innovative take on art "work," using a work zone figure and caution signs — "Brain May Conduct Creativity," for example.
"I wanted to have fun with it and create a look that was graphically strong," says Pietrzak.
Another senior from PCA&D is taking a gritty, true-life look at police work in Scranton. Photographer Danielle Sheerin is from Scranton and her father is a police sergeant. She grew up hearing stories of the police and what they had to deal with on a daily basis.
So for her senior project she set out to humanize the police with a series of photographs that show the tension, grief, compassion, quiet moments and stark reality of patrolling Scranton. Sheerin's photographs are powerful and gripping.
In one, a disoriented woman is talking to a police officer, who seems to be trying to calm her. She is disheveled and distressed. And she has black and blue marks all along her upper arms.
"I don't tell the viewer what's going on. I want them to consider the possibilities. And I want them to understand what police officers feel when they go out on a call. They never know what will be behind the door when they arrive," says Sheerin.
Sheerin, who hopes for a career in photojournalism, spent time on patrol with the police and documenting what she saw, capturing scenes of drug busts, domestic abuse, car accidents and even St. Patrick's Day parades. She tried to remain unbiased and objective, recording images as a photojournalist would, being a witness on the scene.
"I use my camera to look at both sides, to maintain a neutral perspective," says Sheerin.
While some artists look at reality, others take a more fantasy-based approach. Illustrator Randy Haldeman's thesis project takes him back to his childhood as a comic book fan. He has created his own superhero, The Redeemer, who fights crime in mob-era Chicago. The Redeemer controls the darkness and is out to "take down" the mob.
His masked hero was created when he was in ninth grade. He hopes to take his childhood passion further, drawing and writing comics through his Keyhole Comics Studio.
Jessie Gray, a fine arts major at PCA&D, has painted sets at Fulton Theatre and displayed her work in art shows. She likes the rich colors of oils and seeks to evoke emotion in her paintings, which she does from memory. That gives her work a dreamlike quality, especially with a recurring image of an exotic-looking yellow bird that appears in many of her works.
"When my son was a baby, a yellow bird with a long beak landed near my feet," says Gray, adding that the bird has become a good luck charm that she places in her paintings.
Some 60,000 square feet in the college will be transformed into exhibition space for the Class of 2012 to display their senior thesis projects. In the three-level main gallery of PCA&D, there will be one selected work from each graduating senior just inside the college's main entrance at 204 N. Prince Street.
The exhibition will include wearable art, motion graphics, illustration, graphic design, printmaking, painting, photography, 3D illustration and more. Live music will include Rue de la Pompe, the Tom Witmer Duo and the Mark Huber Duo. Refreshments will be served.
PCA&D Senior Show & Celebration
Sat. 3 p.m.
Free
Pa. College of Art and Design
204 N. Prince St.
396-7833
