Disclaimer: Krista Mitchell is a staff artist for The Daily Campus.
Krista Mitchell is an eighth-semester art and creative writing student at the University of Connecticut. After receiving a Presidential Scholarship, which provided her with $2,500 to fund a project, Mitchell collaborated with Associate Professor of Printmaking John O’Donnell to make an exhibit at the VAIS art gallery. The reception for the exhibit was on March 27.
“I wasn’t really sure what to do at first, but last year I saw Irene Pham’s exhibition in the gallery and after I saw that, I decided that this is what I want to do,” Mitchell said.
“I only had one class with John O’Donnell before, but I felt like he would get what I was trying to do thematically and understand what I was trying to do,” she continued.
“I went through a bazillion books to find all of the collage images, and then over my winter break, I made all the collages, and in February I turned all of it into a little book,” she said, referring to the “Joker Stardust” art book. The art book is dedicated to Mitchell’s grandmother, Catherine “Kay” Holloway.
“I went through her house and I took a lot of her artwork and I repurposed it in the collages to give it a new life and to celebrate her art as well.” Holloway created some of the art on display, such as the cloth circles, some stained-glass imagery of a gun and a turkey-like bird made to celebrate her husband’s passion for hunting.
The book goes into detail about Mitchell’s perspective while creating the art pieces and curating the multimedia project. The center of the exhibit seems to be centered around a certain quote from Mitchell in the book: “Is our world created from stardust by an omnipotent jester in the court of the universe, or is the divine intentional with its creation?”
It is in these pages that it becomes apparent that the majority of the art pieces are untitled, but the creations follow themes such as life, childhood, creativity, middle age and death.
The gallery was structured not by chronological creation of the pieces between 2024 and 2025 but rather the cycle of life and death. Accompanied by the art pieces is information on what materials were used to make the art pieces. The majority of the works are collages mounted on wood panels with a matte medium and sometimes acrylic paint.
Starting with birth, Mitchell used a cross-stitch of a baby her grandmother made. The piece next to it is a large wooden panel with cut graph paper. A shape similar to a baby’s head is one of the pieces of graph paper.
Another piece is a small wooden panel covered in tin foil, with two collage images of baby doll heads wearing hats pasted on. The piece next to it is much larger, having collages of human babies and four people presumed to be mothers holding babies.
In the childhood section, there are these beautiful paper flowers stuck onto the wood panels accompanying the images of children, some playing together. The natural imagery of the pieces could represent how childhood is a time of innocence before true corruption.
There was then a section addressing the concepts of life and death. Beyond the stained-glass art made by Michell’s grandmother, the life section has two electric candles, two babies and an angel figurine. The death section has a miniature clock, a black dog figurine and a metal merry-go-round.
The creativity section has these cloth circles Mitchell’s grandmother made, and Mitchell repurposed them for the exhibit. One wooden panel has the cloth circles hanging off it. On this, Mitchell said, “The idea of creativity interacts with the idea of consumerism and religion.”
One of the questions she wanted to propose to the audience was whether or not it was in humanity’s best interest to find intention in life and creation if they themselves believed they were created intentionally — for example, in terms of a higher power.
A particularly striking part of the exhibit was the collection of three shelves labeled from top to bottom: “Heaven,” “Earth” and “Hell.”
For the “Heaven” shelf, there were two figurines of Amish people and then four monkeys covering various parts of their faces, a reference to the proverb of “See no evil, hear no evil, say no evil, do no evil.” In between them resides an unlit oil lamp.
The “Earth” shelf has a miniature television set, a baby figure and a tiny pack of Coca-Cola bottles.
The “Hell” shelf is extremely peculiar. It has this red dog figure that operates as a coin bank. According to Mitchell, she found it in her attic, and it belonged to her grandmother. Other objects were sourced from antique stores. Even more peculiar was the snow globe with the character Snoopy inside of it from the comic series “Peanuts” and the “Charlie Brown” animations.
“Middle Age” features adults in the collages and the cloth circles make a return in one of the pieces.
One of the most beautiful pieces of the exhibit is this circular collage that looks like outer space, mostly in black and white but with touches of blue, pink and orange on the outer rim.
The final part of the exhibit is death, which is a bit eerie with the deteriorated and weathered image of a man’s face on the first piece in the sequence. The final piece has a picture of a woman paired with lines of dominoes on the left and right edges of the wood panels. The plastic could represent a loss of nature in favor of industrialization.
“All of this work was really built over, I’d say, 15 to 18 weeks of conversation,” O’Donnell said.
“It was a long, convoluted process but it all came together in a really smart show,” he said.