SoFA exhibits spotlight student projects; one senior trying to blend in

Photography wasn’t senior Corey McNair’s first choice for a college degree.

Nor was it his original goal the second time around.

But Friday, the 39-year-old bachelor of fine arts student will attend the first in a series of five opening receptions and exhibits this April in the School of Fine Arts Gallery and Art Museum, where McNair’s photographs will be on display in a show titled “Industriality.”

All studio areas — from photography such as McNair’s to graphic design and painting — are covered in the graduating bachelor and masters senior thesis shows. Students helped plan the exhibits layout and installed their work for the shows.

In addition, students exhibiting in the Art Museum will give gallery talks about their work at 6 p.m. before their opening receptions at 7 p.m. every Friday in April.

McNair’s outing marks a change in his typical Friday schedule, which usually includes working 10 to 12 hours as an engineer in Columbus, Ind.

The engineering and artistic parts of McNair’s life, which he says don’t make a lot of sense to many people, just seemed to click during a photography class in 2007.

“It appealed to the technical side of me,” he said. “I could take digital prints and work with them or work in the photo lab with chemistry. It kind of appealed to that engineer in me that’s still hanging on.”

McNair holds a bachelor of mechanical engineering degree from Colorado State University and worked as a design and development engineer in the automotive industry for 14 years before returning to school at the Henry Radford Hope School of Fine Arts.

“I just got tired of living in a cubicle,” he said.

McNair originally came back to school in order to pursue a degree in drawing and painting.

“My mom says I’ve been drawing pictures of Batman since I could pick up a crayon,” he said. “I remember sitting down and actually trying to draw landscapes with crayons and colored pencils as a kid ... I never had access to a camera, so I would just sit down with a pencil and draw or sit down with paints and paint.”

In his first semester at IU, McNair took a photography class with Shelley Given, who is currently an adjunct professor in the fine arts school. In that class, McNair said he found a certain joy in the ability to capture every little detail with a camera, something he’d always tried to do in his paintings.

The grand finale

McNair’s show, which has been on display since Tuesday, looks at industrial landscapes. The show actually began as a side project but was changed to the main attraction at the end of last semester.

The show features a series of 10 pieces, each of which is a compilation of six to 20 photographs that have been stitched together in Photoshop.

McNair said the stitching allowed him to create things that weren’t really there, such as sharp angles, dangerous-looking objects or complex scenes. These things, he said, contribute to the sense of confusion he is trying to portray.

“While I am very familiar with industry and have an affinity for it, I also recognize all the damage it’s done,” he said. “You look at the state of our economy and how it’s collapsed, and I think a lot of the emphasis that this country put on building up the industrial side of things wasn’t the smartest thing for us to do.”

Facing the challenges

McNair, whose salt-and-pepper beard betrays his age on a campus dominated by 20-somethings, anticipated the challenge of the age gap between himself and other BFA students.

“At almost 40 years old, I was really afraid of coming back and not fitting in at all,” McNair said, “and that has not been the case. They’ve been really accepting. They treat me just like any other student. There’s a lot of respect, a lot of great discussion.”

However, as he tries to maintain a social life, McNair said the age difference is more pronounced and goes beyond the streaks of white in his facial hair.

“It makes dating a little difficult,” he said. “I’m not comfortable dating someone who’s 21, that just doesn’t feel right. And the people my age are professors and grad students who are instructors, and so that’s a little awkward, too.”

After facing this dilemma for three years, the soft-spoken McNair circumvented the issue when he met someone on a trip to California.

“She’s an amateur photographer herself and a lawyer, so she has a bit of the dualism as well,” he said. “She very much understands it.”

However, he said, that degree of understanding is not the norm.

“It’s almost like people see going back to art school as just trying to play and not being serious about my life,” he said. “And that’s very much not the case.”

Even members of McNair’s own family, especially his dad, are skeptical about his choice.

“He could not believe that I was giving up a six-figure job to go back to school,” McNair said.

The next step

Once McNair has completed his degree, he said he hopes to get a job as a forensic photographer, taking pictures of things like accident scenes or building defects.

“It’s as close as I can get to combining engineering and photography, I think,” he said.

He landed on this career choice partly because of his girlfriend and his step-mom, who are both lawyers.

They told him that forensic photographers, particularly ones who have the know-how to take a good picture but also know what to take a picture of, are in high demand.

McNair said he thinks his fine arts degree will give him an edge in this field and will continue to open new doors and experiences.

“I used to think of photography as just documenting, just capturing what you see,” he said. “And I learned that you can really make statements with photographs and have intellectual content in them. That I found to be really, really moving and unexpected.”