Cory McAtee is an art education major from Williamstown, West Virginia who has artwork in the senior capstone exhibit at the Marshall University Visual Arts Center.

His passion for art started when he was young with drawing and playing Pokémon.

“I played Pokémon a lot when I was little and I always loved to draw while watching the show and it stemmed from there, I never stopped doing it,” McAtee said.

His art continued even in high school, when his art teacher helped him realize that he wanted to pursue teaching art for high school students as a career.

“I knew I wanted to be a teacher,” McAtee said. “I thought being a teacher was a cool idea. Having a really good teacher helped me a lot in high school because it is a nontraditional subject and I got to express myself a lot. I like how art made me feel when I make it.”

McAtee did not have Marshall University picked for his college choice originally, however, after visiting, he decided it had a home type of feel and had people he knew there.

“I honestly had this expensive private school in my brain because my senior self didn’t realize loans and stuff was going to affect things,” McAtee said. “Then I had this epiphany late in the game and my best friend in high school was going to visit Marshall and I was like, ‘Dude can I please go with you?’ I came here and I thought this is a pretty cool place.”

Through the years, McAtee has helped run the Smash Brothers Club and has enjoyed doing clinicals and teaching other students.

McAtee describes his senior capstone, “One Self,” to people by asking them to visualize the thinking of a brain as the computer.

“It was kind of like taking the idea of technology and self-reflecting, how I see human emotion through that,” McAtee said.

Several of the pieces were made in just one sitting. Many were made when he was making art while he was aggravated or upset about something. He explains it became therapeutic. There are some that are more figurative, for example, the center piece where he made himself with the head starting to spiral out.

“It’s a weird combination of technology and human emotion,” McAtee said. “There’s a lot of binary code in the work. The way I describe the binary code in my artist statement is that it’s like how when you have thoughts or feelings sometimes you don’t understand the way you’re feeling. The text on there, unless you know how to read binary code, you’re not going to know what that means. All of the binary actually says stuff, but some of it is splotched out or cut off. That represents how your mind can be a jumbled mess from time to time.”

McAtee’s work can be seen at the Charles W. and Norma C. Carroll Gallery in the Visual Arts Center in Pullman Square. The gallery hours are Monday through Friday 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Krislyn Holden can be contacted at [email protected].