Dead flies a change of scenery

"I'm pretty sure art doesn't exist," Walt Ohnesorge-Fick, senior, said.

As Ohnesorge-Fick is an art major, this strikes one as an extreme and controversial statement but his views—not just of art—generally seem to be just that.

Ohnesorge-Fick has a long history with Ottawa. His mother, Karen Ohnesorge, is an assistant professor of English at the college and took him to her first interview at OU when he was just an infant.

"In a lot of ways, OU really helped him blossom," she said.

The personal connection to OU is strong for the 23-year-old Ohnesorge-Fick and his many mentors here include Erika Marksbury, Nikola Ristic, Frank Lemp and Barbara Dinneen.

Lemp, Ohnesorge-Fick's art instructor, sees Walt's strength in a great amount of focus and many interests.

"Walt had tendencies to attempt projects that were more on the graduate level because of the time they would consume," Lemp said of some issues Ohnesorge-Fick encountered with his undergraduate work.

Ohnesorge-Fick is graduating this semester and was accepted to the Design & Technology Masters of Fine Arts program at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he can explore his desire for bigger projects. Personally, he thinks one of the reasons he was able to get accepted to the program was due to the recommendations he received from his mentors.

As do many artists, Ohnesorge-Fick searched for inspiration in controversy and personal dislikes. He says his art was influenced by OU and his peers but mostly fueled something he likes to call "horror art."

"Many people at Ottawa have trenches in sports or religion that are extremely dogmatic, impossible to enter into, and massively damaging to those who don't find themselves in one of the aforementioned cliques," he said.

Both Lemp and Ohnesorge feel that Ohnesorge-Fick has many different interests and that graduate school will help him to utilize those and subsequently focus on his strengths.

Ohnesorge-Fick sees it as a fresh start and seems excited to enter the next stage of his life.

One of his biggest influencers, Bruce Nauman, taught at SFAI for a while.

"Hopefully some of his aesthetic is residual in the school," he added.

Lemp said that a song called "You can count on me (to do my part)" by Mose Allisons and

Van Morrison best describe Ohnesorge-Fick as an artist. It talks about the problems when a man is wrapped up in his art.

"I think many of the faculty at Ottawa have had it up to their ears in my bipolarity," Ohnesorge-Fick asserted. "It's probably time for me to wear out some different people."