Halfway between campus and downtown, covered in all seeing eyes and miscellaneous posters of art and art exhibits, WARPHaus is an overlooked workshop that produces freshman art students’ blood, sweat, and tears.
WARP which stands for Workshop for Art Research and Practice, is the mandatory class all incoming art students meet three times a week at the WARPHaus art studio for.
This semester–long class is time consuming, eye opening, and full of endless possibilities. The students are encouraged to work with different kind of art mediums they are not familiar with. Thus, their pieces are difficult to create and require a lot of vision and courage. Students have done media pieces, performance pieces, and even challenged the laws of physics to provide a piece that will showcase their dedication and creativity.
After the completion of every project their piece is graded based on their critique. Critique is the intense, nerve-racking class day where the professor and the artists go from piece to piece observing, describing and interpreting what they see. The artist stands behind the group, exposed and vulnerable listening to them critique his/her piece.
This past weekend I was lucky enough to attend WARPHaus’ spring semester gallery opening, where each student from the spring 2016 class showcased their best work.
WARP class of Spring 2016
Walking around the gallery, I was in awe. While all the pieces were so different they all exuded a sense of creativity and dedication. I was galvanized, inspired, and stood in front of a cucumber sculpture of a penis for longer than I should have.
Phillip Giangrosso’s piece was a faux collaboration with Maurizio Cattelan titled Over My Dead Body. Maurizio Cattelan is a famous Italian artist known for his satirical sculptures. To emulate Cattelan’s work and incorporate his own artistic style he constructed a bridge out of wood where he laid under it holding a rose to symbolize his dead body. Phillip laid under his piece for half an hour and guests were encouraged to walk over the bridge to represent them “walking over his dead body.”
Carina Krehl’s piece was also a faux collaboration. She “worked” with Damien Herst to create her piece called Virgin Mary Pops Her Cherry. Herst is an artist known for his religious imagery and infamous for his frequent use of killing dead animals to use in his art. His gory practice has made him the richest artist in the U.K. While Carina had moral issues with his work she compromised by going to Nettle’s Sausage in Lake City to collect animal blood. She used the blood to paint the image of Virgin Mary holding a holy ice cream sundae.
Ryan Widgeon created a piece titled Mmmmm Girl, which is made with freshly cut fruit. The piece serves to depict the stereotypical wants women and men look for in each other. He sculpted an erect penis made out of cucumber, kiwis, and seeds to represent what women want and two breasts made out of melons and a butt made out of two watermelons to represent what men want. Because it is made out of fresh fruit, he had to recreate this piece for the event.
While WARP is notorious to all UF art students and art teachers as one of the most difficult and challenging art classes, the students come out of it more open minded and with a newfound respect for different art mediums.
“This class gave me the opportunity to try things in art I never would have done. It made me think of art in a whole different way.” said Carina Krehl.
Walking around the WARPHaus gallery this weekend it was obvious what she meant. The artists were so excited to have their work showcased and every guest to come in was just as taken aback as I was.
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