After spending a summer in Venice for an art residency and working in Texas for five years, artist Veronica Ceci, graduate fine arts student, will present her talents through a solo art exhibit in the Uumbaji gallery in Oscar Ritchie Hall from Monday until Friday.

Now in her second semester, Ceci earned the opportunity to exhibit a portion of her work that will be featured in an upcoming show called “Room of Relief.” She said this portion of her work represents the idea of finding a place of solitude within a hectic world.

“Most of my work is focused on our relations, as people in a Western country, with our digital devices. It started out primarily observational,” Ceci said. “I would just take photographs of people interacting with their devices and how it kind of takes them out of where they are because if you’re looking down, you don’t realize what’s going on around.”

Ceci said her work focuses primarily on relief printing, which includes woodcuts and linocuts. She said she has been working on her pieces since she was invited in April 2012 to display her work in the “Room of Relief” show March 15 through April 27. Ceci said inspiration for her body of work came from her summer in Italy.

“I started realizing that there are so many people who seem to have a challenging time experiencing their environments if they weren’t experiencing it through a machine,” Ceci said.

The reception for Ceci’s exhibit in the Uumbaji gallery will take place Feb 27. Ceci said this is a chance for her work to attract a different audience, since the gallery is the only one in Oscar Ritchie Hall.

“It’s a nice opportunity to have your work seen in a different building because showing stuff in the school of art is great, but it’s also nice to expose it to people who are in a completely different department because this is the building for Pan-African studies,” Ceci said. “So you get a different crowd coming through and looking at stuff.”

Ceci said she teaches Introduction to Lithography and Introduction to Printmaking. She hopes that her students will better understand prints after having taken her classes.

“Printmaking can be really technically oriented, it’s not really a medium that everyone will feel comfortable expressing themselves through, but because it’s so technical, a lot of times people will see them in a museum setting or gallery show and won’t understand what they’re looking at,” Ceci said. “If they can see them out in the real world and appreciate them more because they’ve tried it, then I feel like I’ve done my job.”

Abbey Kish, junior art education and fine arts double major, is taking Introduction to Printmaking class with Ceci. She said she admires Ceci’s abilities as an artist and professor. In regards to her professor’s artwork, Kish said she finds Ceci’s work appealing.

“They’re very interesting and very graphic,” Kish said. “Her application of color and subject matters are very bold and very visually attractive.”

Jessica Fatkins, senior fine arts major who took Lithography with Ceci last semester, plans to attend the reception Wednesday. Fatkins said Ceci’s gallery work is relatable to many college students and people in today’s society.

“We have become attached to screens, whether it is our phones or computers, to talk with each other,” Fatkins said. “Her work makes me question how we interact with one another through computers and phones, and how there are pros and cons and that we don’t need to be attached to these things.”

Joanna Kamvouris is the School of Art reporter for the Daily Kent Stater. Contact Joanna Kamvouris at [email protected]