Coburn Gallery: November 2014

Ashland University’s Coburn Art Gallery, in collaboration with the Department of Art, has scheduled its annual fall “Senior Art Exhibition,” which provides a capstone experience for graduating art majors. For students of the liberal arts, the exhibition is the culmination of their undergraduate careers at Ashland University.

An opening reception will be held on Nov. 6 from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. in the Coburn Gallery inside the Center for the Arts on the AU campus and will kick-off the exhibition, which will run through Dec. 14.

The exhibition will include artworks created by Karly Beuck of Lodi, who is a bachelor of fine arts painting major. Beuck is a fifth-year senior in the BFA program and she has been studying painting for four years as well as art history, and has studied ceramics for two years. She also plays goalkeeper for the varsity soccer team on campus and is a member of Theta Phi Alpha Fraternity.

Beuck’s painting series is titled “Strength: Inferiority Not Consented.” The series presents Greek women out of their mythical contexts and challenges their stories by changing the character’s typical demeanor found in myth into one to be revered and respected in today’s society.

Beuck achieves her message by painting such characters as Medusa, Pandora, Artemis, Atalanta, Amazons Penthesilia and Hippolyta II, as well as a couple lesser-known female figures from Greek mythology, Melinoe, and the sphinx that plagued Thebes. It is due to the raw nature inside herself that drives Beuck to be a strong-willed and competitive woman she has been drawn to these fictional females from the past that are not always seen tough in mind, body and spirit. Beuck have given these women today’s confidence in a time where they were not always portrayed as a role model for society. Where these women were being defeated, unacknowledged or seemingly unnoticed for their valiant efforts in myth, she, through these portraits, is giving them the respect and recognition they never received.