Interview with Mary Shelffo

Tiffany: My name is Tiffany Dodson and I will be interviewing Mary Shelffo for BFA Thesis artist interviews. Hi Mary.

Mary: Hello.

T: So to start off, what’s your concentration?

M: I’m doing a concentration in photography and design.

T: What made you decide to pursue a career in visual arts or something related to it?

M: Well Mason Gross is actually the only art school I applied to, and I applied to a lot of schools and I actually had a teacher at the time, she was my computer graphics teacher. She encouraged me to come to Mason Gross. I was always interested in art so, that’s kind of how I wound up here.

T: Okay. So what do you want to eventually do with this degree?

M: I used to really want to do illustration, and that kind of started at Mason Gross because I really liked the drawing classes I took here. Since then, I’ve done an internship where I did creative marketing and I really enjoyed that advertising side of design. I just feel like I want to try a lot of things out before I ultimately decide.

T: Do you have any idea what you want to do for your thesis project?

M: Well, I know that I want to use both of my concentrations, multi-media of some sort, and I’ve been thinking of thesis words which is something we have to do for design. My thesis words are: memory, identity, and collection. I am really interested in what people’s stuff says about them and the kind of things that people collect as well as personality and the kinds of things you choose to expose to people. It’s kind of all over the place still though.

T: If you had to choose some kind of them to represent yourself and your fellow classmates for the thesis show, what do you think you would choose?

M: Hm, that’s a hard one. Something revolving around the fact that on the one hand, this is something that is revolving around the culmination of our college years, but on the other hand, it’s just the beginning of our lives after college. I can’t really equate one word for that but that would be a good connecting theme. Because presumably it’s something you’ve been doing since you started here as a freshmen, even if you weren’t exactly thinking about your thesis project at that time, you’ve been working towards it. And at the same time once it’s done, you know, you’re out there.

T: Tell me more about your experiences within creative advertising because that seems like the avenue you’re learning toward as far as job searching after college.

M: I worked at Lord & Taylor over the summer and I was in the marketing department and I did creative marketing, so I worked on a lot of direct mail pieces and a lot of internet banner ads. The coolest thing I got to do, they had an event, it was a back to school fashion show for kids and I designed all the new signage for it. They gave me the name, the event was called “School La-La”, and so I designed the logo mock up. They used it on all their mailing stuff, which was really cool. I was actually buying something, and I went to the register, and they had a stack of these next to it that they were handing out in the store. I was just like, “Oh my gosh! I made that.” So that was the coolest print thing I got to do because it was totally me, whereas some other stuff that I did, I got to choose colors for, and yeah it was still going out to people but that was more all me. Also, they have a new social media page that they just put out and I designed the banner and the icon to be used for that. The best thing about it was having an actual real experience. I went into it thinking I was going to be doing some standard intern stuff and I got to a lot more which was really cool.

T: So you worked in a corporate office?

M: Yeah, in New York City, their

5^th Avenue

flagship store. It was a really great experience and I got to go to New York everyday. So I can show you one of the sketches I did, I took it and sketched different ways I thought it should be laid out and then the sketches go to the art director, the art director picks one, and they get sent to the photographer. And so the photographer shot it based on my drawing. And after editing and everything, you can say what you like and what you think should be changed, and ultimately you’d get the final product. The other thing about it too was, I’ve been taking design since I started here, and this was much more hands-on, and it makes a big difference.

T: How is it working in design in an actual work environment?

M: It’s fun. It’s a lot of work, but it’s fun. There’s not so much of a thematic element to my work, but I am into color, especially in photography and design too. I’m just drawn to color and I like making different color combinations. I also find myself over and over zooming into things and getting this really close detail to where, you can’t even tell what it is. I feel like I do have a lot of overlap with my two concentrations just in developing my own style.

T: Okay well thanks for speaking with me, it was very interesting learning about your artwork.

M: Thank you, you also.