This semester the Blue Room is not just a place to spend your Flexpoints on coffee and muffins - it is also home to a series of visually alluring paintings by Bre Duffy '05 that explore the creation of self during the college years.
Duffy, who concentrated in Visual Art and the History of Art and Architecture, is an aspiring artist who is facing the frightening post-graduate question: What can I do with the rest of my life?
Duffy's answer is art. "I definitely want to keep painting and get involved in different art organizations," she said. While she remains open to careers in graphic design and architecture, she has decided for the moment to try making it as an artist, a goal that seems easier than it is, she said.
In the increasingly competitive scene of contemporary art, an artist must aggressively market herself while continuing to nurture her creative drive. "To be a successful artist, you must be successful in business," Duffy said.
To give herself the business background she needed, Duffy attended the Tuck Business Bridge Program at Dartmouth last summer. This program provides a rigorous introduction to accounting, finance, managerial economics, marketing and strategy, she said.
Business experience in hand, Duffy said she has been marketing herself for the past few months to art galleries and studios in the Providence and Boston areas. The exhibit in the Blue Room - Duffy's senior show - was an important step in the right direction.
The show, titled "Reflections," was inspired by a series of murals she saw while abroad in Galway, Ireland. These overwhelming murals were painted by members of the community based on the ongoing conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland, she said.
The eight paintings that make up "Reflections" try to imitate the color and conceptual depth of the murals, Duffy said. "I was moved by how interesting it was to grow up with these very strong images around you. I wanted to translate that into my own college experience," she said.
Specifically, Duffy is fascinated by the way in which political and cultural atmospheres shape personal identity. In her paintings, she captures various personas in their most vulnerable moments, which are private in nature but often occur in public. "In each work in this show there is a quiet tension outside the canvas that you can't really touch upon but you still know its there," she said.
"The Other" depicts five women in the Faunce House women's bathroom. Duffy uses the reflection of the figures in the bathroom mirror to subtly twist reality, making the reflection different from what is going on in the room.
She was drawn to the public bathroom as a setting because of the strange mixture of public and private that the room embodies, she said. "I find the public restroom to be a strange place because of the snap judgments people make about others," she said.
Thanks to her show in the Blue Room, Duffy now has an offer to show her work in a local gallery in Providence called westsideArts.
The gallery offer gave her the confidence boost she needed to focus on her career. "Graduating was very strange for me. I didn't know what direction to go in, but having someone who owned a gallery come up to me and offer me a space gave me a signal that I could make it as an artist," she said.
Despite this offer, Duffy said learning how to publicize her art has been a challenge. Her advice to up-and-coming artists: "Get really good photographs of your work, upload them onto a Web site, and always carry a camera and notebook. You never know what you are going to see," she said.
Her paintings will stay in the Blue Room until the end of October. The Brown Student Art Forum, a group that maintains gallery and studio space for students, made the exhibit possible.
