MITCHELL — A pair of Mitchell High School art students placed in the top five recently of their competition categories at the South Dakota State Visual Arts Competition.
Drex Martinek and Sofia Torgersen each placed at the annual competition with their submissions in photography, digital media/graphic design and colored drawing.
Martinek, a senior at Mitchell High School, took a third-place finish with his photography piece titled Rows. He took inspiration for his piece from his time spent at the Mitchell School District’s Performing Arts Center, where he shot the photo.
“In this image, I used a small aperture in order to catch the sharp lines in the pattern and was forced to use a slower shutter speed due to the darkness of the environment,” Martinek wrote in his artist’s comments on the piece. “I also had some control of the environment and turned down the lights near the back rows to create a gradient in light levels that brings the attention more toward the direction of the stage.”
Torgersen took a third-place finish with her digital media/graphic design piece titled Ouroboros (The Divine and the Cyclical).
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“Back in March of last year, an online friend of mine named Nox and I were discussing ideas for a character we had. They lost interest pretty early on, but the concept gripped my brain and didn’t let go over time,” Torgersen wrote in her artist’s comments. “Over the summer, I began to get ideas for one portrait to express the concept as solidly as possible. This is that portrait. The main idea is that the subject character in this image began finding cassette recordings of his own voice of events that never happened to him. Through his need to know, he was dragged into a cycle started by a past version of himself.”
Torgersen, also a senior at Mitchell High School, also received a fifth-place finish for her colored drawing titled Lovecraft Eat Your Heart Out.
“This piece was a graphic design class assignment. The idea was to illustrate a word, making each letter into things associated with that word,” Torgersen wrote. “I had to make a whole sheet of different ideas for words, and I ended up getting stuck between cosmos and eldritch. In the end, I chose eldritch, because I felt there was much more I could do with it, and it would be more fun.”
Results for the South Dakota State Visual Arts competition can be found at the South Dakota Public Broadcasting website.
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