Breakfast with Amber

April 2022: Recomposition

We return to my classes. Remember that digital journalism class that was giving me anxiety? Well, I still had one more story to write that wasn't the character profile due at the end of the semester or the final story. I also had a different assignment due, which was to live tweet an event at school. I had been scrolling through the daily LeeRoy newsletter for something that seemed newsworthy, but where most journalists saw a story, I just saw an event happening on campus. So far this semester, I had only written one story, and it was on a lecture on ecological criticism in Latin American film. If I was going to pass this class, I'd have to find something else.

So when I was in class watching Dr. Liu scroll through the LeeRoy and asked, "Who wants to cover the senior art exhibition?" I said, "I will."

The art exhibition at the end of the year was the culmination of all the work of the students in the senior art seminar, and it lasts from late April until the semester ended in May. The opening night for this one was going to be on April 21, and I had to be there because it was going to be the poppingest night of the exhibition, and this due date was coming up fast. I was literally downloading Twitter while walking to the event, messaging Dad to ask him to approve the request to download it because I was 21 years old and in college, and Dad still hadn't realized he could turn off app download requests for his kids on our iCloud plan.

Anyway, I got Twitter downloaded on my phone and was still trying to figure out how the app works as I entered the art gallery. I must have arrived pretty early because there was nobody there before I showed up, but people started trickling in. The objective was simple: go in, take five or more photos for the Twitter thread, interview three people for my story, and leave before the crowds got to me.

At 5:04 pm, I finally got tweeting, starting with a picture of the decals on the wall next to the art gallery's entrance that made up the sign for the exhibition. It said: "re-com-po-si-tion: Senior Art Major Exhibition; April 21-May 21, 2022; Jay Dunn, Maren Merwarth, Chryslyn Perkins, Ren Rader, Juliet Sikorski, Lila Steffan, Denise Turati, Bygoe Zubiate." From there, I started wandering around the exhibition looking for works to tweet. I probably also looked up "how to start a twitter thread" on Google before getting started because I still did not know how Twitter works.

Anyway, at 5:08, I took my first artwork photo, two photographed portraits by Maren Merwarth called "Droste" and "Mona" (I could not tell you if they were self-portraits because while I do have memory of meeting Maren Merwarth, I don't remember her face). At 5:13, I tweeted a picture "The Dream," a massive 72x36-inch painting by Juliet Sikorski of a naked woman lying in a field of blue flowers. It was at this point that I remembered Dr. Liu's advice to add hashtags to each tweet so that more people would see it, so I added "#art #trinityart" at the end of the caption. At 5:15, I noticed a table with multiple copies of a comic book called "Bear With Me" by Ren Rader available for visitors to take. I thought, "No way they're giving out comic books here!" I took one, snapped a picture of the cover, and tweeted. I think I still have that comic, but I cannot satisfactorily tell you where it is.

At 5:21, I found an ochre and charcoal drawing on handmade paper by Lila Staffan called "Ponderosa" and took a picture of that. Finally, at 5:26, I took a picture of three floral watercolor drawings by Jay Dunn called "Someone's Garden."

Then I had to get to the interviews. I had three interviews to do: one with a student in the exhibition, one with a faculty member in the art department, and one with an audience member. However, I didn't recognize most of these people and didn't know which students were in the exhibition and which weren't. The easiest thing to do was find a student and interview them as if they were an audience member. I found two girls standing next to "The Dream" who seemed easy to talk to. I asked for their names. One was named Katarina Perales, and the other was Juliet Sikorski, who had painted "The Dream." For this interview, I decided to focus on Katarina. (Why I didn't also interview Juliet right then and there is a mystery to me.) Katarina was originally there to see Maren but was also enjoying the other pieces. Her other pieces were "Illona," another piece I recorded no information on except that it was purchased by the library, and "The Dream." Juliet interjected, "You want a secret? It's ultramarine blue."