Hello! By now, I have graduated Oberlin College, and am long overdue on my reflection post for this blog. I finished moving out of my studio, and boy has it been a tumultuous month. Pictured to the right is all the scrap wood I collected over the year with the intention of making another installation space with cloth walls, creating a room within the gallery for my final Senior Studio exhibition for my furniture and sculpture. In the end, all the installation and sculpture pieces had to be removed, and I decided on pairing my desk with a chair and plants borrowed from a classmate, and one of the pieces I submitted to the midterm show with some small adjustments and extra notes from the rest of the year, as a sort of capstone to my Oberlin Experience, which is the title of that piece. Even so,  I'm incredibly satisfied with what I have achieved over the year. I graduated with a full load of coursework and job experience within holistic learning, africana based pedagogy, and experience in art based teaching methods, tutoring, and leading creativity centered math workshops.

I really did end up leaving Oberlin having accomplished the goals I set out to complete. I may not have designed my own major around project based learning and holistic pedagogy, but I ended up finding a much more effective, and ironically enough, holistic path. I was able to learn about holism in education by experiencing it myself! My advisers, especially Professor Darko Opoku and Professor Caroline Jackson-Smith pushed me down the path of Africana Studies. Within the curriculum, was a deep tradition of scholarship on Africana philosophies and pedagogies. Not only were the theories and practice the professors at Oberlin taught exactly the kind of education I had been searching for, but they one upped me in so many ways by immersing me in a deep historical understanding of Black activism, thought, and culture. Critical Race Theory fits perfectly into explaining how the American education system was never meant to benefit students of color, and in many ways serves to continue generations of oppression. There is much more I could speak on, but to keep this post to the point, see some of the ideas I learned about during my four years at Oberlin in my Africana Studies Capstone.

I designed this desk back in October at the beginning of the course. I designed it in a way that would utilize all the skills I had learned thus far, without incorporating anything new, like I had been doing with the other projects. I knew it would be a huge undertaking, so I wanted to keep the processes required to make it simple. I didn't realize it would be as intensive as it ended up being though. In my inexperience, I completely forgot to factor in sanding and gluing up such a huge piece. The sanding of each component actually took weeks. I had to ask friends for help in holding pieces together to glue them, and used way too many clamps. Probably more than I needed, in retrospect. ​​But I could never be too sure. Sadly, I ran out of time to construct my drawers for my final show, so I quickly built a shelf mock up to slot inside the empty space. Even though I intended the desk to be a culmination of my learning, I still ended up learning a lot more while building it. I started with a to scale mock up, which taught me that most of my design didn't work.

My biggest goal and challenge was to construct the center so I could sit in it, with the desk primarily being supported by the back weight of the plywood sheets on the back, and the cabinets on either end of the side desks. While mocking it up, I was surprised by my final design. The center of gravity of the center desk ended up working out perfectly, leaning back and standing up on its own. Using it without the side desks though wasn't too sturdy. But once I connected the desks together, they fit perfectly and no matter how hard I press down on the center desk, it doesn't budge. I designed the foot rests to the perfect height for when I lean back, and even measuring that out was an adventure.

These last few weeks I finally finished milling the pieces for my stools and buying the materials for my upcoming desk project. I ran into many complications I wasn't expecting in creating the pieces for the stools. I have never built any kind of chair before. I understood the engineering behind spools and supports, but didn't have a tangible representation of that until now. I also cut the legs at custom angles similar to the bar table, and left the rough edge. It took me a while to get the supports just right. At first I wanted them to be octagons, but it just didn't feel right with the design of the chair. After a lot of fiddling and testing, I decided on rough circles.

My final project for the halfway mark of the full year Senior Art Seminar was a bar table made out of hardwood pine boards for the table top and footrest, as well as recovered barn support beams with the rough edges left on for the table legs and supports.

This project was my first major challenge as a beginning woodworker. I attempted to build the table legs and outer rim of the table with the rough edge to preserve the look of the piece before I milled the beam down. I didn't fully understand before I started how hard it would be to work critical pieces to the structure and stability of the table, as well as descending at a custom angle, without having all four edges being perfectly square. I built my own custom rig to be able to drill holes in the table legs to carve out the joinery, and worked extra carefully with many mistakes along the way to join every piece together flush to come to a sturdy end result that preserved all the design elements I saw in my original pieces of wood.

This week I completed constructing my bed frame, and then installed it in my room. I designed a bed to create a "bed room," where the bed fully fills the space. I also designed it as a floating platform style that would be very sturdy for the 12" memory foam mattress inspired by images on pinterest. Installing it was more of a challenge than I had expected. Before constructing the frame, I had taken exact measurements of the space as well as the radiator. I hadn't accounted for the small deformities and curves in the wall and floor.

I know this blog is supposed to be about my senior studio, but I've been working hard on a bar table and floating platform bed project, and don't have enough to show yet to warrant a full blog post. Instead, I'll talk about a transformative experience I had last year that really made me want to pursue the visual arts program as a second major. I took Sculpture and Installation with Nanette Yannuzzi-Macias, and it was the first time I really fully explored and experimented with various materials on a large scale. I was convinced going into the class I'd have to work small, and wracked my brain to figure out how to answer prompts because I had no money to invest into the course. Nanette convinced me that I could make a compelling sculptural piece with cardboard. Well, she told me that, and then showed me many incredible examples, but I still didn't think I could pull it off. See, I had no faith in myself as an artist. Up until this point, I had just experimented with various mediums in high school.

Hello! I'm Aiury Cavallo, and I am going into my final year at Oberlin College. This means confronting the scary world of Senior studio and seminars.

Because of this Senior Studio course necessary to completing my Visual Arts major, I have to start a blog! So here's to new beginnings and documenting my work from here on out. To launch this blog I will be writing about where I've been as an artist, where I am now, and where I'll be going over the course of this year.