The Art Gallery is providing an opportunity for the campus to view works by 33 fine arts department faculty which are showing today through Dec. 12. The exhibit includes a wide variety of style and color throughout and students get to see a different side of their instructors.
“This is an opportunity for students to see what the art department faculty does with their own personal work and to see if it’s a direction that might be interesting to them,” Susanna Meiers, curator for the Gallery, said. “It (the exhibit) gives you a little view of who that person is.”
Harrison Storms, professor of art, teaches life-drawing and beginning drawing.
“What I teach and how I teach has almost no connection with my personal work,” Storms said. “I am interested where a form begins and ends, which in my perspective, is very porous.”
Storms is showing two pieces in this show: Johns Canyon #31 and #32, acrylic on Gesso and limestone. He begins the process by painting an acrylic figure on a limestone slab. He then, using big industrial machinery, grinds away the area where he painted the figure. He repeats this process over and over.
“Part of what I am trying to deal with here is the sensuality of the surface,” Storms said. “I am very interested in the process of the surface and how things evolve if you just allow yourself enough time for the evolvement to take place. It requires an enormous amount of patience, there’s at least a hundred hours of work in each piece.”
Some professors, like Pam Huth, have created pieces that are directly associated with what they teach. Huth’s sculpture, “Propagation,” is made out of 8’x12’x24′ lengths of PVC pipe which resemble the bones of a beached whale or the skeleton of a ship adrift in the middle of the gallery floor. Soap and water has been poured into the PVC pipe and bubbles leak and hang down the ends of the pipe. The bubbles stick together and drift and shiver as people walk by.
“This piece has to do with growth systems and it is about life, death and rebirth,” Huth said. “It symbolizes how everything is used and reused throughout life and death; I wanted to do a piece that showed that things continue on. This is my way of saying that inside of the piece is still vibrant and alive.”
This is Huth’s second semester of teaching 3-D design. Her artwork deals with the same principles that she teaches to her students, the elements of design, concentric circles and lines.
Joyce Dallal has been teaching digital media to students since 1992. She has one installation in the show, “Landscape with approaching storm: UN resolutions 181, 194, 242 and various other peace initiatives,” a photograph made from archival pigment prints with charcoal and pastel.
“My family is from Iraq, but we are Jewish,” Dallal said.
The piece creates a landscape made out of crumpled UN Resolutions and the viewer feels like they are being buried alive.
“I show my students my work at the beginning of every semester,” Dallal said. “I think it is inspiring to know that teachers have an artistic practice and career.”
