First Senior Exhibition By UPB Interdisciplinary Arts Major

“A.J.” Laganosky, a senior at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford, will break new ground next week when he becomes the campus’s first interdisciplinary arts major to present a solo multimedia exhibition in the KOA Art Gallery in Blaisdell Hall.

Laganosky’s exhibition, “Battle of the Brutes,” will integrate the worlds of baseball and music through music and original compositions performed by Laganosky, computer graphics, multimedia and traditional art forms.

The exhibit will open with a live music performance at noon Monday, Dec. 1, in the gallery, followed by a reception at 12:20 p.m. in the KOA Speer Electronics Lobby that is free and open to the public. The exhibit will run through Dec. 5 and is part of the Pitt-Bradford Spectrum Series.

“Working on this exhibit has been a great learning experience for me,” Laganosky said. “Getting to work with Kong Ho, associate professor of art, and Dr. Lee Spear, associate professor of music, has been a great honor, and nothing is better than hearing them say ‘it looks/sounds great.’”

As part of his senior capstone requirements, Laganosky also had to write an artist’s statement about his work.

“My interests in baseball, music and art have influenced my life almost every year in one form or another,” he wrote. “‘Battle of the Brutes’ encompasses the struggle between baseball, music and art in my life.”

Laganosky hails from Carlisle, where he grew up playing music. He didn’t take his first art class until he was a sophomore at Pitt-Bradford. In addition to studying music and composition with Spear and art and design with Ho, Laganosky has studied ceramics with Dr. Martie Geiger Ho, visiting assistant professor of art, and Japanese art and basket weaving with Isabelle Champlin, assistant professor of anthropology.

In creating his exhibit, Laganosky used many multimedia computer programs, such as Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign; IMovie, GarageBand, Finale Notepad and iDVD.

Ho, who is also director of the interdisciplinary arts program, said that Laganosky’s exhibition is the first senior capstone exhibition for the major, which was first offered in 2006. The interdisciplinary arts major requires students to complete 52 credits in three disciplines, art, music and theater.

“His multimedia exhibition truly integrates the areas of art and music and will set a good example for the future interdisciplinary arts students,” Ho said.

Spear said that, “A.J.’s project goes far beyond being interdisciplinary. He has developed artistic hybrids by integrating elements of his training. No one of our courses in music prepares a student to compose at the scope that AJ has accomplished. He has pulled together melodic and harmonic concepts, arranged them according to classical models, and used his music technology skills to turn them into an underscore for a video presentation of his project. This work sets a very high bar for future capstone projects. It is an ideal accomplishment.”