Art Faculty Member Priscilla Roggenkamp Wins First Place

Art faculty member Priscilla Roggenkamp wins first place in  the 2017 FRESH Juried Art Exhibition @SummitArtSpace. Congratulations !

Winners of the 2017 FRESH Juried Art Exhibition: Refugee by Priscilla Roggenkamp, Double Presence by Emily Duke, Bandage by Jasmine Kornel, Pond and River, both by Erica Bishop. 

Juror, Charles Beneke, Professor of Art at the Myers School of Art of the The University of Akron. 

Artist Statement

Refugee

Priscilla Roggenkamp

I have always been aware that the accident of my birth in this time and

place determined much about my life. Certainly my safety, beyond the

general pitfalls of life, has not often been in question. I can look to the

future and to the future of my children with a sense of confidence and

surety (within reason). But in our world there are many who have been

born into a time and place of strife and struggle beyond their choosing.

What must that be like?

How do you leave all you know and move to a new land? Great stories

from the all cultural histories and religions tell of the challenges and

motivations that make it impossible to stay in one’s homeland and

agonizing to go to a new land.

In most family histories there was a great trek, a mad scramble or a long

slow voyage to this new land. Many of us have family trees with stories

of those who have traveled from afar for a new life here in America.

Even more difficult is the lot of the refugee, those for whom leaving is

not a happy choice. Fearing for one’s safety and for the safely and future

of one’s family, refugees embark on difficult journeys. Some of their

tales are harrowing; some do not end on safe shores but in extreme

hardship and even in the loss of life.

What we carry through life has been a recurring subject in my artwork.

These fabric buckets, made in the manner of ship’s canvas buckets (with

a nod to Winslow Homer’s painting Fisher Girls) are figural vessels made

to carry. They were created by the ocean, dyed indigo to match the

color of the water and then sent on their own journey from the waves in

Maine to the variable weather on my Ohio homestead. These objects

can only give a nod to the types of brave journeys that refugees from all

times and places undertake.