Marisa Gomez, a senior visual arts major, said she likes both clean and messy art. From printmaking and drawing to photography and digital design, Gomez has a wide range of experience in fine and visual arts.
After spending her freshman year studying at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, Gomez transferred to UNM. To add to her portfolio, she is working as the marketing director for the ASUNM Southwest Film Center, where she spends time creating fliers and movie posters. Here are five of her favorite projects in the arts.
“The most recent project I did was really exciting. Our project was to create some kind of public display, and so what we made was a camera obscura at the Duck Pond. It’s where the light comes in and it flips the image on the other side and you create this dark place. We had this tent and covered it with a tarp and trash bags so it was really dark inside. When we attached a lens to the outside, you could see this awesome image inside.
“I enjoyed the project because it’s a very simple concept. It’s like the concept for photography, but not many people do it; it’s not a common occurrence. It’s this really cool old technique that they used to make photographs back in the day.”
“There’s another one from my Art Practices class that was fun. I took a big, white piece of paper and on the back of it I drew a reflection of what my apartment layout was so I could use that as a reference. I basically mapped out my footprints and path throughout the day in my apartment with thread and needle sewn into the paper. And that was just a different use of material, other than fabric and drawing a route straight on paper.”
“I took a sculpture-making class up in British Columbia. For our first assignment we had to manipulate this cardboard into this huge object, so I stripped it down and made this huge bird’s nest. And then I made these papier-mâché eggs out of the paper coating on the cardboard, so I had these little broken eggs in this huge cardboard nest.
“When I was done with it, all my friends and I carried it across campus into my dorm room, and it was my little reading nook.”
“Last semester, I took photographs of people with scars on their bodies. It was kind of an exploration of how people can carry scars from accidents and how they have a visual reminder. But there a lot of people who don’t have a visual reminder of scars that aren’t necessarily physical: there can be mental scars of trauma. So (it shows) there’s this disconnect between being able to see something on a person, but then not knowing what’s happened to a person, just from meeting them.
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
“A lot of people had multiple scars, so I was able to photograph a bunch of different ones. Some were pretty simple, (but some) were definitely more personal stories behind them. There’s something that’s either very meaningful or trivial.”
“In the art history department there’s a design history class. We had to design an object that was influenced by a different time (period) or style. I made a teapot set, but it was inspired by coffee tables. There were some of these really cool artists that I found that made these neat coffee tables out of reclaimed wood, and they inlaid glass into the wood. It was absolutely gorgeous.
“So for my teapot set that I designed ... I made it so that there was a glass cup and wooden one that slid on top of the glass one. It didn’t need to be that crazy in-depth, but we had been working on the idea all throughout the semester.”
Jenna Stoff is a culture reporter for The Daily Lobo. She can be reached at culture@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @JennaStoff.
