The Art Department’s Faculty & Staff Exhibition is currently running in the Weems Gallery in the Gaddy-Hamrick Art Center. The exhibition opened on Jan. 25, 2024 and will be running until March 10, 2024. This exhibition includes many pieces by the faculty and staff within the Art Department and showcases their skill and creativity using different mediums and techniques. There are various artworks using mediums like digital media, acrylic, unglazed ceramic, hand-dyed fiber, mistinted house paint, bricks and wax and more.
The works featured by Professor Dana Lovelace, the Program Director of Graphic Design, show her focus and interest in typographic patterns. Professor Lovelace explained how her work embodies certain aspects of a technique called tessellation used by M.C. Escher, a graphic artist, which she defined as “big pictures made from small square tiles.” Lovelace uses this technique to further explore typographic patterns and displays how typography can “decorate… by repeated use of single shapes.”
Additionally, Professor Slater Mapp uses digital photography to display two photographs that are part of a duo show with Trish Klenow, an oil painter and art teacher. The piece is called “Tarot Garden” and it is meant to make the audience search for personal meanings within them using the various objects and symbolism displayed in the images. Professor Mapp uses a multi-exposure image-capturing technique that gives the photographs transparent layers and “ethereal quality.”
Professor Holly Fischer, Assistant Professor in Studio Art, uses ceramic sculptures woven with thread to explore and display feelings of “internal tension.” Her pieces are fluidly shaped and she wove red threads tautly between different sections of each figure to show the way in which certain “obligations and responsibilities” hold the shapes together. Professor Fischer shared that she uses the red thread to show how one’s choices become part of who they are as a person.
Deb Laube, an administrative assistant and textile artist, displayed several pieces using embroidery, weaving and fused glass. Her embroidery pieces are a part of her “A Stitch a Day for a Year” series which displays various plants and landscapes.
Another featured faculty member is Professor Todd Jones, who recontextualizes discarded mistint house paints by giving them new shapes that take on the form of various rocks. Professor Jones describes using the mistinted paints to transform them into “a visual record of cultural history,” since house paints are typically used to “add desirability” to one’s home but are often discarded for being the wrong color or because consumers continue to move on to the next best thing. Each of the layers represent the development of society “through patterns of culture/identity shedding.”
Using a different technique, Professor Cameron Johnson uses printmaking and abstraction techniques to address “the idea of sacrifice and the internal challenges of selflessness.” He explains how he used the reduction print method to create different layers that were carved from one matrix and printed on top of each other. By using this technique, he was able to create a sense of both surprise and exploration that is intriguing to the viewer.
The Art Department Faculty and Staff Exhibition includes creative works by other professors within the department that address and explore other compelling values and ideas. There are more abstract, textile, sculpture and other pieces included in the exhibition that haven’t been discussed in this article and will be available for viewing until the conclusion of the gallery.
By Elaina Irving, Staff Writer
Photo courtesy of Elaina Irving, Staff Writer