By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
With the university’s spring semester heading into the final stretch, the time has come for students demonstrate the skills they’ve acquired during their studies at BGSU.
On Friday night, the Medici Circle, the School of Art’s support group, hosted its first Mingle with Medici. The event gives students who have benefited from the group’s support to meet with the members who made that assistance possible. The event also offered Medici Circle members a chance to get an early look at the Undergraduate BFA exhibit, which formally opened Saturday.
On Saturday, the College of Musical Arts held its Wayland Chamber Music Competition. Ensembles of three to nine musicians competed early in the day, vying for cash prices. At night the four winning ensembles returned to perform in concert.
‘Emerging’ talent
“Emerging” was the theme of this year’s Undergraduate Bachelor of Fine Arts Exhibit.
These 61 artists are at the beginning of their careers. The show makes clear that BGSU has given them a great launching pad. The work on display demonstrated strong technical skill and their emerging artistic sensibility. That sensibility is colored by the times this class, which began its studies in the shadow of the pandemic, has experienced. Taken as a whole, it represents a portrait of the time.
Social concerns colored much of the work. Dominating the scene is a larger than life-sized replica of Michelangelo’s David, poised to confront Goliath. Created by Devin Herr, this David, though, is equipped with more than a slingshot. The statue has video surveillance cameras embedded in it with monitors situated in the rear. Its eyes capture the scene. The viewer seeking to evade the statue’s gaze by circling behind is caught by another lens surreptitiously placed in the leg.
Facing it is another piece that makes a large statement using a more traditional medium. McKayla Lange crafted her “Organic Symphony” from felted wool. Lange, an art education major, pursued her love of fiber art despite the school having closed that department a number of years ago. But when she asked the sculpture faculty if she may do this project, they gave her a thumbs up.
She fabricated the underlying molded structure in the sculpture studio. The fiber work was done at her apartment. That included creating most of the dyes used in the eye-popping kaleidoscopic work.
She did this while working full-time student teaching in the Rossford schools. She brought her felting skills into the classroom. She had each of her upper elementary students create small squares based on a life experience.
A number of works on exhibit make reference to mental health concerns. When Alyssa Russell lists the materials for one of her paintings, she includes acrylics, graphite, white charcoal, colored pencil, and PTSD . Another lists depression.
The best of show winner was a familiar name. Hannah Bowlus, a Bowling Green High School graduate, won best of show in last year’s undergraduate show, and then this fall earned top 3-D honors in the BG Arts Council inaugural Community Art Show.
She continues her concentration on innovative use of glass. “Generative Design Thinking” was inspired by Punnett Squares used to study DNA that she learned about in biology.
Bowlus used the qualities of those squares to generate the designs for a series of pieces. She then brought those designs into being using steel and hand-blown, molded, and spherical glass. Each of the seven pieces, she said, could stand on its own. Displayed together, Bowlus said, “you can see how they originated from the same idea, all derive from the same three variables. But because of those variables interacting in different ways and crossing in different combinations, you get these wildly different outcomes.”
Wayland Chamber Competition
Students with a record of winning also rose to the top in the Wayland Chamber Competition on Saturday.
Clarinetist Justin Brown* has pretty much owned the competition since arriving on campus. A junior he was a member of the winning undergraduate ensembles in 2022 and 2023, and in 2022 he was also a member of the second-place winning ensemble.
That group, the Hansen Trio, re-appeared in new form this year as the Messiaen Quartet, and won the top prize in the graduate division.
The pianist in the ensemble Abigail Petersen was a member with Brown of last year’s winning undergraduate ensemble, and the second-place group in 2022. She won the Competitions in Music in 2022 and then was part of a winning duo in the Conrad Art Song Competition in 2023.
Joining them in the ensemble was fellow junior Joshua Lyphout, cello, and graduate student Malika Brower, violin.
The quartet was formed specifically to work on Oliver Messiaen’s landmark “Quartet for the End of Time,” one of the signature chamber works of 20th century.
Petersen said that in their first year at BGSU they heard another student ensemble working on it, and decided then they wanted to eventually learn it. They just needed a violinist.
Brower said that her teacher Caroline Chin encouraged her to tackle the piece with the quartet.
She is working on a performance certificate, having already earned her master’s at BGSU. Her standing determined that the ensemble would compete in the graduate division.
Petersen said the story of the piece is part of what captivated her. It was composed by Messiaen while in a German prisoner of war camp during World War II writing for the instruments played by fellow inmates.
In addition to the two movements from the Messiaen piece, the quartet also performed “Entwining” by Paul Novak. The piece was written in response to a call for scores issued by Lyphout. The call was for works for cello and up to five instruments. Novak’s piece came out on top.. Later this semester he will perform a recital featuring all the pieces he selected.
Saxophonist Mary Borus, a member of the Early Bird Saxophone Quartet, also has had a taste of victory. She won the won the Competitions in Music in December, performing with the Philharmonia in February.
The Early Bird Quartet – Borus, soprano saxophone, Aidan Peper, alto saxophone, Nathan Wood, tenor saxophone, and Lukas Bass, baritone saxophone – got its name from their rehearsal time, 7:30 a.m., in the fall semester.
That speaks to the difficulties for them and the other ensembles to find time they can get together to rehearse given their already busy schedules.
But that commitment is worth it. Wood said. Working in a small ensemble is appealing. “It’s a very intimate setting with a lot of collaborative work,” he said. “Not having someone conduct you, you’re responsible for the tempo and style. We have to make decisions together.”
They worked with their ensemble coach Garrett Evans to decide on the pieces they would perform: Quartet for Four Saxophones by Alexander Glazunov and “Keen” by Roshanne Etezady.
The Glazunov was “a very classical piece in Romantic style,” Peper said, with a theme and variations form. They loved it right away. Borus said that she appreciated the way the composer wrote different movements in the style of other composers such as Chopin and Schubert.
“Keen,” composed in 2004, presented a dramatic contrast. “That really pushed us,” Peper said. “We grew fond of it.”
Also performing at the winners recital were:
- Second place winners in the graduate division: Asteria, a flute trio of Bekah Walker, Skylar Diehl, and Eunha Kim performing a movement each from Trio No. 3 for Three Flutes by Friedrich Kuhlau and “Orion’s Belt for Flute Trio” by Nicole Chamberlain.
- Second place winners in the undergraduate division: The 5/4 Bar Quintet – Cruz Stock, bassoon, Kathryn Swanson, oboe, Hannah Huddle, saxophone, Mackenzie Zdrojewski, clarinet, and Ricky Jurski, bass clarinet – performing movements from “Nuclear Child Games” Babur Tongur and “Circusmuziek” by Ton der Doest.
A total of eight ensembles played Saturday morning for a panel of outside judges to determine the winning ensembles.
The winning ensembles will perform a WGTE Toledo radio broadcast Friday, March 22 at 10 a.m. and a Brown Bag Music Series concert Friday, March 29 at 12:15 p.m. in Simpson Garden Park, Bowling Green.
*An earlier version of this story had an incorrect name listed.
