Rene Magritte

One of Rene Magritte's paintings I chose as inspiration was “Personal Values”. I was interested in this painting for its odd proportions, yet they represented what items were most important during that time. I chose to mimic that idea with my piece by making a cell phone with Snapchat; due to the increase of value that's been placed not only on our electronic devices but the way our peers perceive us as individuals. I also added a comb as a direct representation of Magritte's painting and how we use forms of personal grooming to make ourselves up daily. Shelby Hendrix

There were so many elements of Magritte’s work that I found unique and it was so cool to get to see such a variety of his work at SFMOMA. I really liked the concept of depicting everyday objects against unfitting backgrounds to make you think about them in a way that they are not normally presented. I chose to use his famous cloudscape background as the background for my piece. The main focus was a brain. Although this wasn’t featured in any of his work, I wanted to create my piece in a way that would draw attention to the brain. I have always been fascinated by the human brain, and getting to hold one in my anatomy lab years ago was and still is one of the highlights of my college education. Abby Harrison

I liked the cloudscape in Magritte’s paintings and his ability of creating the mysterious out of commonplace objects and people. While his character is usually a man, I chose a woman in my project. The MAC Apple symbolizes the modern and changing world. The woman’s back on the other side of my cylinder was taken from a Magritte painting. While one might expect a face on the other side of the cylinder, I made a flower to reflect the unchanging roles of or views about women. Wen Jiang

After getting feedback on how I could make a branch, I decided to go for it and see what happened. I made a plan for assembling a main branch with the hole and smaller branches to attach the actual flowers. After assembling that using coils, I rolled a branch on the clay to give it natural texture. Then I wrapped it in plastic. I made petals for the dogwood flowers and set those aside in plastic. Then I went back and added the tiny inner beads using wet slip and scoring. When all the flowers were done, I scored and slipped the flowers to the branches as they dried out. I had to work around the piece as it dried at different rates and I had to balance getting the flowers on without being too heavy for the structure of the branch.

I really like having the flowers on campus. I was a little surprised when I first saw it in the syllabus because I didn't think a beginner's class would be able to make art that was "good enough" for an art installation. I'm glad I was wrong - I learned a lot just by seeing what other people in our class made and I was really happy we got to challenge ourselves and each other with this project. Christine Siska

Rene Magritte questioned, “What is reality?” Part of this questioning came from an experience he had as a young boy. When he was 14 years old his mother committed suicide. She went down to the river down from their house and drowned herself. Magritte is certain he saw his mother's body floating down the river but no one believes him because they said he was in bed that night the entire night. So a lot of Magritte's work is questioning what is in fact real. Katie Frank

It doesn't matter how prepared you think you are for installation day, there will always be surprises. We had organized whose piece was going to go where and on which lamp post before installation day so all we would have to do is install the pieces around the lamp post but once we got to the lamp post we realized that some of the pieces would not fit over the lamp wiring cover plate so we had to reorganize everything. It is a real group spirit to try to change the plan and still not compromise the work of the artwork. Katie Frank