For the next four weeks, the Zilkha Gallery will display the theses of graduating seniors in the Wesleyan Art Studio Program. The shows will present four or five different artists a week in an amazing opportunity for the artists not only to present the work they have done for the whole year, but to present the work on such a grand scale. This week the show displays the work of Catherine Gavriel ’09, Cara Stewart ’09, Jeremy Fisher ’09 and Toshiro Osaka ’09.
Gavriel’s “In View – Composed Interiors” combines a sculptural installation element with the foundation of her work: her paintings. Her exhibit indicates a well-developed dialectic between the paintings themselves and their subjects, which are the seemingly commonplace objects in her installation. Gavriel creates a tension between the expectations of what the viewer is seeing in the paintings and the actual object, as the viewer is able to instantly compare the paintings with their subjects.
“I think my work is about still-life and the viewers’ relationship with the still-life painting and the objects,” she said. “I want the viewer to engage and be active in the gallery space in such a way as to reinvigorate the viewers’ relationship with the ideas and tradition of still-life.”
The paintings and installations guide the viewer through the perspective of the artist, and allow the viewer to interact with both the painting and objects. The paintings are not in the vein of photo-realism, which forces the viewer to move through the space to compare angles, composition, colors and depth.
The paintings seem to be more colorful than the objects themselves, which implies that the artist sees something that everyone else does not. She brings life to objects as lifeless and banal as: a wooden box and a rusted stool. Perhaps even more interesting are the vacuous backdrops on which these objects lie. The gray, limestone-like color of the backdrops nearly blends with the limestone from which the gallery is constructed.
Cara Stewart and Jeremy Fisher are sculpture thesis students who differ in the direction of their work. Stewart’s “Idle” pushes the viewer into a world of mechanized sculpture, filled with interplay between the work and the spectator. He has taken ordinary electronics and even non-electronic devices and possessions—such as a suitcase, a radio and a student desk—and automated them. When entering the gallery, the viewer is greeted by the almost theatrical quality of a curtain of electrical wire and the sheer, aggressive noises of an uncontrolled radio, a vibrating desk and a rotating lamp.
“In my show, I’ve tried to expand the relationship between humans and the objects in their environment by making simple machines that perform behaviors associated with emotions,” Stewart said.
Which is exactly what they do. The scene resembles a ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ situation, where everything becomes a modern marvel but at the same time has all gone haywire. How can you pack a suitcase if it’s running away from you? The answer: you don’t—you watch it a little bit, startled and yet astonished. Most interestingly, though, is when all the mechanized objects shut off in unison, allowing you a reprieve to take it all in.
Fisher’s “RE Inc.” is an eclectic group of sculptural forms that occupy the southern enclave of the gallery. In contrast to their surroundings, the sculptures seem to pop out at you. The forms are geometric in essence, which allows Fisher to play with the solidity of shape and form. Three black box-like polygons stacked one on top of another in a stair-like formation stand out from the other colorful, saccharine sculptures. The black boxes at first seem stable and solid in construction, but this solidity is betrayed by the transparency of the material and the hollowness of the form.
The sheen of the stretched and woolly fabric and the softness of the padded shapes are completely sensual. The wall piece, in which a single strand of red fabric—with a white line at the center—hangs from the top of the gallery ceiling to the bottom, begins to disintegrate as it reaches the floor. The fabric is reminiscent of the continuity of the CNN logo, and yet is undermined as it gets closer to the floor.
“Corporations are using iconography as a system of power to create a visual language to create a recognizable, calculated identity that carries implications,” Fisher explained. “The sculptures were trying to subvert the original intentions of the logos and call to attention how these logos affect how we think.”
Osaka, an architectural thesis student, explores the extremely interesting concept of social interaction patterning which is rooted in urban planning focused on commuter towns. In “Juxtaposition of Programs: Hyper Interactive Space,” he tries to foster a sense of community by creating and exploring an ‘everything in everywhere’ sort of situation where there are libraries in parking lots, outdoor shopping stands and aquariums at train stations, and dance halls in office buildings.
The final product is a beautifully modern and futuristic combination of a train station and public pools in a multi-leveled super-station. It is thought out and displayed in a clear and concise manner that is sleek, fresh and avant-garde.
“There isn’t enough interaction in commuter towns,” Osaka said. “I proposed a high interactive space and the program is an architectural word for a physical environment that facilitates an activity. I basically proposed to fuse two activities and chose a train station as a site because it is the center of a commuter town by nature and a swimming pool because there is a similarity in that circulation dominates the activity of both. Both buildings are flexible in shape and can integrate both activities.”