PERSPECTIVES

Amy Aramanda
Bachelor of Fine Arts, 2012
Dean’s Award for Outstanding Artistry

“When I was deciding what to study, I don’t think I seriously considered anything other than art.” Amy Aramanda has studied throughout the Department of Art, but she also took courses in accounting, history of theatre, stage makeup, and dance, and even a horror movie class. Makeup and costuming have always been part of her work.

According to Amy’s mentor, Professor Peter Goin, “Her work is truly interdisciplinary; working with concepts in painting, photography, theater, the history of art, Amy creates a finished artwork that is polished to the smallest detail. In fact, she makes artwork that viewers consider paintings when the objects are photographs; the crossover with subject matter is clever, smart, all the while requiring literally weeks of work to complete one image.”

For her series Salon de Mélange, Amy painted the bodies of models to evoke well-known works of art, found props and fabrics that matched the original paintings, photographed the models, transferred the photographs onto canvas, and made Victorian-style frames. The body-painting alone took from six to nine hours. According to Amy, “Salon de Mélange not only questions the historiography of art, how and what we are taught, but how and what we see.”

In addition to the painstaking creative work she did in the studio as a Nevada undergraduate, Amy served as secretary of the Art Club, laboratory assistant in the photography area, tutor in the university’s writing center. She served as a volunteer in the Sheppard Gallery and with Youth ArtWorks.

Amy has had solo exhibitions at the Front Door Gallery, Biggest Little City Club, and Studio on 4th, and Holland Project Gallery in Reno.

See images of some of Amy Aramanda’s work at her website: http://amyaramanda.com/?page_id=2