December 8, 2020
Lydia Gonzales, 3-D Art Project, Salvador Dalí
Las Vegas, N.M – New Mexico Highlands University media arts and technology students will showcase their work in the department’s annual fall exhibit, which will be virtual this year.
This year’s web-based virtual exhibition in the McCaffrey Historic Trolley Building is using the platform Gather.Town and will be available online beginning Dec. 10 at https://gather.town/app/UhnuXKaNqfZJoR7H/TrolleyLobby The full exhibit will go live at 5 p.m. and will be active until 8:30 p.m.
“On the night of the show, Dec. 10, there will be lots of excellent student work placed around the Trolley Building,” said Miriam Langer, department chair of media arts and technology. “Despite the pandemic, we’re sticking with our longstanding tradition of exhibiting work from this fall’s classes in photography, graphic design, typography, 3-D modeling, character animation, videography and more. In addition, we’ll be showcasing the work of the 2020 Cultural Technology summer internships.”
Langer said media arts and technology graduate and current MFA student Becca Sharp built the innovative virtual McCaffrey Historic Trolley Building site for the exhibition. Langer said the exhibit space is open to the public as in past years, using a COVID-19 safe virtual platform.
“Gather.Town is a virtual space that allows users to create a custom icon, like the ones used in video games, and then use arrow keys to walk around the building. Becca spent many hours faithfully recreating the McCaffrey Historic Trolley Building floor plan in Gather.Town so that visitors can see student work in the spaces they are used to: the lobby, critique rooms, the labs and the black room for screening videos,” Langer said.
Langer said that this year the fall media arts and technology exhibit is a juried show that will feature some alumni of the program as guest judges. The alumni judges determined to date include Desiree Rangel, Erick Rangel, Mireya Rodriguez, Veronica Black and Dré Gallegos.
During the fall semester, Langer said that media arts and technology maintained robust instruction and student output during the pandemic.
“Of course, we miss being in the building together. We hope to welcome the campus and community back to our beautiful Trolley Building as soon as it is safe. However, the students have continued to work hard on projects such as Lauren Addario’s Media Arts Seminar class doing an oral history project with the City of Las Vegas Museum and planning our spring 2021 Program for Interactive Cultural Technology program with the Santa Fe Children’s Museum,” Langer said.
Langer said the media arts and technology program brought in more than 20 guest speakers into the program during fall semester.
“We invited national and international guest speakers to enrich our students’ learning experience,” Langer said.