Every year the members of the Art Department get a chance to display their personal work in the Faculty Art Exhibit. It is an opportunity for the professors to see their pieces in a gallery setting and for their students, colleagues, and friends to get a glimpse of how they apply what they teach in the classroom to their work.
This year’s show will feature Professors Dave Huth and Ted Murphy’s sabbatical work, installations by Professors Alicia Taylor and Ryan Cooley, ceramics by Professor Gary Baxter, and watercolors by Professor John Rhett.
Upon returning from a year devoted to his studio practice, Murphy is ready to exhibit the pieces that he has been faithfully working on for eighteen months. His works are mixed media, combining graphite drawings and washes of color that create invented spaces. “Baroque” is the term Murphy uses when describing the pieces. Out of the forty pieces he has made for this specific project, Murphy has chosen twenty-five to appear in the gallery.
Baxter will display what he does best, ceramics. The common theme of his wheel-thrown bowls is trout, which are intricately drawn on to the bottom, sides, and inside of his bowls. The series has taken him about eight months and in order for the pieces to make the cut for the show, they had to “come out of the kiln singing” said Baxter. His pieces are “Spiritual relics that are inspired by the natural realm” and that “celebrate and honor the beauty of nature.”
The dynamics and nuances of the gallery space were crucial for Cooley’s “site specific” photography installation. His piece involves a combination of suspended lights and photography with the intent on focusing on the physicality of the photograph. “I’m thinking less about the content of the photograph and more about the viewer’s relationship to the photograph,” said Cooley. He wants to push the limits of the “viewers sensorial relationship” with an image, hoping to make it involve more than just sight. Cooley’s installation is “experiential,” meaning you need to see it in person rather than on a computer screen to fully understand it.
What Baxter looks forward to most from the exhibit are the reactions that people have to his work. “I enjoy just seeing them smile or have a look of confusion or bewilderment,” said Baxter.
Murphy thinks that the Faculty Art Exhibit is important because it is a chance to share with the students what he is doing. “It doesn’t make sense to encourage students to do work and not do it ourselves,” said Murphy. For him, it is an opportunity for his students to judge whether or not his work has “any relevance to their work.”
Getting to see his work and also his fellow faculty members’ work in a gallery setting is what Cooley is highly anticipating. The exhibit is also a chance to see his work come to life. “Because it is so site specific, it almost always exists just as an idea until I can set it up,” said Cooley.
The Faculty Art Exhibit is now open at the Ortlip Gallery and the reception will be held on tonight, Friday, February 6th at 6pm.