The Faculty Art Show at the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery showcased the work of 10 faculty members in several mediums, including painting and sculpture. Professor of Art David Schorr, who has taught in various artistic disciplines, has paintings on show. John Frazer, professor of Art, also has paintings exhibited. Art Studio Technician Kate TenEyck’s work in the show is sculptural. The exhibited work demonstrates the faculty’s artistic skills both aesthetically and conceptually.
“Unlike other group exhibitions that I curate, the artists in this one chose their own,” said Zilkha curator Nina Felshin. “It seemed appropriate to me that they decide how they want to represent themselves.”
Students who attended the reception for the show showed appreciation for the range of work represented in the exhibit.
“One of the interesting things is the range of conceptually versus technically oriented works,” said Matt Larkin ’10, referring to Professor of Art Tula Telfair’s oil paintings. “Some are conceptually oriented and then there are these intricate oil paintings, which is cool.”
Telfair’s works on exhibit are all landscapes. Telfair said that her interest lies in the tradition of romantic landscapes. In an interesting twist, the landscapes she painted are done inventively—they come purely from memory, and are not taken from a photograph or from a specific site.
John Frazier’s oil paintings were inspired by a book on still life that he read, titled, “Looking as the Overlooked.” Frazier takes simple and uncomplicated objects, like those in “Leeks, Garlic, and Peppers,” and puts them against a dark background.
Professor of Sculpture Jeffrey Schiff created two of the more abstract works. One of these works is “Mobile Global,” a floor installation of a series of carpeted tiles. Schiff is interested in the idea of the contingency of order and disorder and the way things conglomerate.
“I’m very interested in floor,” Schiff said. “I’m very aware that this floor sits on the floor of the gallery which sits on the floor of the ground.”
In “Vertical Hold,” a piece of digital prints of clouds with steel poles seemingly fixing the clouds to the sky, Schiff aims to contrast the logic of sculpture as an art form to that of photography.
“The clouds are elements that are constantly dispersing and changing form,” Schiff said. “Photographs fix elements in their place, which is false. It’s a false impression of stillness and position and sculpture cannot be that way because it’s in real space and things can be verified as such.”
TenEyck was responsible for other sculptural works in the art exhibit. Her creations, which include “Drum Machine,” a contraption that includes a wheeled wood machine with an oil drum and trowels, and “Saw Machine,” a similar wheeled wooden machine with a large saw attached to it, are concerned with movement. Her other work, “Carousel,” was made specifically for the North Gallery at the Zilkha. It is a large tree-like with wheels on the bottom that give it the ability to be turned around.
“I built that piece for this space,” she said. “It is very tall and I wanted to activate the space high above our heads. I took my inspiration on how to make it move from a carousel and how it makes the horse move up and down above our head. As it turns the branches move against each other, using a mechanism like a carousel.”
Luther Gregg Sullivan Visiting Artist John Slepian, who teaches digital art, created what may be the most interactive piece in the show. His goal with the three works in the exhibit was to “create works that makes us feel connected to the living beings around us.” To do this, Slepian has created his own small living creatures through 3D computer graphics and interactive programming. These fictitious animals can inspire different human emotions. In “Caged,” a small creature lunges towards the screen of the installation as the viewer approaches it, letting out a cry in the process. In “Kiss,” two video installations sit beside one another, the creature in each instillation is pressed up to the side of its respective screen, trying to reach the other one. In “Pet,” the viewer can touch the screen, eliciting purrs of pleasure and cries of discomfort in the invented animals.
Assistant Professor of Art Lesile Snipes showcases her talents in four pencil drawings. Each drawing consists of a meticulous and repetitious pattern of only straight lines, which took long hours to make with a pencil and ruler.
“This one is probably my favorite,” said Keenan Mitchell ’09. “I’m fascinated by pieces that require a lot of applied, tedious labor, and not like a specific skill set more than drawing. It’s wild to me that she just used a ruler and a pencil.”
Assistant Professor of Art Elijah Huge’s works are both intricate and fascinating. Huge exhibits three projects, entitled “Park Slope,” “Intertidal,” and “Overlace.” The design for each project began with site-based research and each work is produced to accommodate the specific conditions of each site. “All the project hover somewhere between architecture and landscape,” Huge said. “Park Slope isn’t in Brooklyn. It’s outside of Manchester in the UK. It’s basically a park for kids that has a series of surfaces that transitions from horizontal to vertical and across that transition can accommodate an infinite number of play surfaces.”
“Intertidal” is a part for Cape Cod. Huge designs around the sea, and the piece has a topography that is carefully calibrated to accentuate the movements and flux of the tides.
“Overlace,” a proposal for a bridge in Venice, draws on mythology. A myth concerning the origin of lace is that lace first came out of a woman knitting seaweed.
“This is about the material translation of seaweed to string and then from string to steel,” Huge said.
Schorr is represented by a small group of paintings of familiar goods—like Chicken of the Sea, Land O’ Lakes Butter, and DeCecco Rigatoni. Schorr travels to India every year, and this series of paintings, temporarily entitled “Goods,” was inspired to create the works by his visits to Indian and Italian marketplaces. Next to the paintings is a digital presentation of goods in an Indian marketplace, which sets up an interesting juxtaposition between the unpackaged goods in the market and the packaged goods depicted in the paintings.
Professor of Art Jay Seeley, whose specialty lies in photography, is represented by nine digital archival prints. Seeley’s compositions, which are typically still-life pieces, are made with a flatbed scanner and thus do not quite look like photographs, but do not quite look like drawings either. Many of Seeley’s works are in book form.
“Anything that opens up like a book seems to be of fascination,” Seeley said.
Master printmaker Keiji Shinohara exhibits three sumi-e paintings in the Faculty Show. Sumi-e is a technique of ink-brush painting. These paintings were inspired by his “observations of the attempts to preserve ancient wall paintings.” Shinohara wanted to reflect the beauty in the passage of time of those paintings.
“Having such an eclectic mix of media and genre only brings to light the connection between all the different media and the artistic process,” Angus McCullough ’10 said. “It’s also a fantastic thing to have the art teachers creating works of such caliber—I think they’re really good.”
Leave a Reply