Rebecca Seidel ’15 reviews the exhibit “Metamorphosis” (on display through Dec. 9)

Rebecca Seidel ’15 reviews the exhibit “Metamorphosis: The Collaboration between Photographer Robert Glenn Ketchum and the Suzhou Embroiderers”. The exhibit is on display at the Mansfield Freeman Center for East Asian Studies through Friday, December 9, 2011. The gallery is open from noon to 4pm; admission is free.

Step up really close to “Graceful Branch Movement,” the most recent piece on display at the Metamorphosis exhibit, and you’ll get blissfully lost in the intricacy of the stitches, the vibrancy of the colors.  Take a few steps back and you’ll appreciate the depth and unity of the work as a whole.

“Graceful Branch Movement,” a six-foot-tall double-sided silk embroidery based on a photographic print by Robert Glenn Ketchum, hangs from the ceiling at the Mansfield Freeman Center for East Asian Studies, where it’s making its debut.  It is one of five such embroideries on display at the gallery, showcasing a prolific artistic collaboration that has spanned over two decades.

Metamorphosis, curated by Patrick Dowdey, exhibits the collaborative work of nature photographer Robert Glenn Ketchum and the Suzhou embroiderers.  Mr. Ketchum and master embroiderer Meifang Zhang began their first project together in 1986, and have been collaborating ever since.  With meticulous deliberation, they work to transform Mr. Ketchum’s photographic art into pieces of Chinese embroidery.

The fusion results in incredibly textured, seemingly three-dimensional works of art.  The pieces on display at the Mansfield Freeman Center merge the natural beauty of Mr. Ketchum’s photography with the intricate serenity of Chinese embroidery—an art form dating back to ancient times.

Mr. Ketchum says that despite a language barrier that prevents them from communicating conversationally, he and Ms. Zhang share a “common language” of appreciation for the work they seek to create.  This appreciation shines through in their collaborative work.

Creating these pieces takes a lot of planning, discussion, and imagination.  The final products display not only Mr. Ketchum’s original artistic intentions, but also the creative visions of the embroiderers.  The highly technical process of stitching also requires concentration and precision.

“When you’re experimenting with a piece like this, you can’t undo it if it doesn’t work well,” explained Ketchum. “If you do it wrong, there’s no going back and taking it apart.”

“Graceful Branch Movement” arrived at Wesleyan for its international debut from Ms. Zhang’s Suzhou Embroidery Art Innovation Center (SEAIC) in China.  As the exhibit’s brochure states, “Robert’s central vision of the super-real in nature comes out more strongly here than in any other work so far in the collaboration.  Meifang Zhang conveys a particular kind of natural beauty with delicacy and clarity in a way that leaves us enlightened.”

The exhibit spans almost the entire two decades of this collaboration: the oldest piece on display, a three-paneled standing screen embroidery called “Beginning of Time,” dates back to 1994.

The press release for this exhibit calls it “a visual experience you will never forget, featuring silk embroideries that celebrate a unique vision of the natural world.”  The embroideries on display certainly breathe an air of magic into Ketchum’s photography.  It’s the type of artwork that you have to see in person, and once you do, it’s pretty much impossible to turn away.

“I don’t bring these pieces out very often,” Ketchum notes. “They’re fragile and it takes a lot of effort to get a nice display.” Don’t miss your chance to see these creations for yourself while you can.

Barbara Fenig ’11 reviews “Excavations: The Prints of Julie Mehretu”

Barbara Fenig ’11 reviews the exhibit “Excavations: The Prints of Julie Mehretu.”

Excavations: The Prints of Julie Mehretu makes the Davison Art Center exhibition gallery radiate with swirls, dashes, dots and splashes of pastel colors. The exhibit is a compilation of twenty prints and is the first comprehensive exhibition from the artist. In the pieces, Mehretu addresses the momentum of civilizations—their inherent creation and inevitable demise.

The works read like fossils, which showcase the creature that once was and its disintegrating present, a diminished shadow of its former self. But unlike fossils, Mehretu’s prints are alive with animated, colorful details. These layered portraits showcase glimpses of city-grids, skyscrapers, rivers, mountains, maps, and weather charts. The images take on voluminous shapes, curling lines, dashes, and vibrant colors to accentuate Mehretu’s study of “the interconnectedness and entropy of modern civilization.” The artist is at once showcasing the evolution of cities, and therefore civilization, while also dismantling the premises of human society. As she adds to the prints, Mehretu’s initial base for the piece—the city grids or weather charts or skyscraper architectural renderings—become enveloped, and often even erased, by cloudlike markings. This layered collage requires the reader to examine each piece countless times before absorbing the artist’s full intention.

Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Mehretu grew up in East Lansing, Michigan; she has lived around the world in Michigan, Rhode Island, Senegal and New York City. She began printmaking while in a graduate program at the Rhode Island School of Design. Mehretu has delved into various printmaking techniques, including lithography, screen-printing, and chine collé, and uses various types of paper, such as gampi paper, in the exhibit. While viewing Excavations: The Prints of Julie Mehretu, it is evident that Mehretu has thought about each aspect of the piece. From her choice for each piece’s materials to the viewer’s final glance at the piece from across the room, the artist has carefully tried to predict the audience’s reaction to her work. And it is this careful consideration that makes each piece so alluring.

Excavations: The Prints of Julie Mehretu is deeply routed in earthly imagery, from mountains to river streams, skyscrapers to clouds. In Landscape Allegories (2004), the viewer first notices what appears to be a volcano—dashes of lava showcase the trauma within the piece. Yet, upon further examination, the viewer sees the world moving past the volcano and watches the landscape heal. The piece at once emphasizes the catastrophe and the reconciliation. Mehretu is ultimately showing the passage of time, crystallized in each portrait.

Many of Mehretu’s pieces in the exhibit do not use color. When the artist does incorporate color, Mehretu asks her audience to uncover this special meaning within each dot, line, or swirl of color. The viewer ponders whether that orange circle is in fact representative of the sun, or an orange, or some other shape entirely unimaginable before viewing the piece.

When visiting the exhibit, it is important to examine each piece from different distances. Just as Mehretu layers details, sometimes illuminating them and sometimes hiding them, the viewer must inspect each piece in various ways. Rogue Ascension (2002) is the ideal example of this. The piece has an undertone of peach clouded strokes. From afar, the viewer might think that this has been painted on top or within the print; however, the peach layer is actual buried beneath the print, an under-layer—like a fossil—, and viewable through a blurred sheet. Up close, the peach is barely visible, yet from across the room it beams forth demanding attention.

Excavations: The Prints of Julie Mehretu runs through December 11, 2011. The Davison Art Center is open from noon to 4pm Tuesday through Sunday. Admission is free.

Jack Chelgren ’15 reflects on “Alvin Lucier: A Celebration”

Jack Chelgren ’15 considers the performances of “Alvin Lucier: A Celebration.” “Alvin Lucier (and His Artist Friends)” is on display in the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery through December 11. The gallery is open Tuesday through Sunday, noon to 4pm; noon to 8pm on Fridays. Admission is free.

Sitting in Crowell Concert Hall on November 5, listening to the Wesleyan Orchestra performing Alvin Lucier’s Exploration of the House (2005), I found myself wracking my brain for ways to describe what I was hearing.  A number of adjectives came to mind—“cavernous,” “meditative,” even “primordial”—as well as other, more evolved images: The sound of singing wine glasses, a flickering of light on the surface of water.  Yet while these depictions evoked different aspects of the music, none of them truly struck its essence, which was a little ironic, given that Lucier’s pieces draw their strange, otherworldly qualities from everyday spaces and phenomena.  Like his most famous work,  I Am Sitting in a Room (1969), Exploration of the House is created by recording and rerecording sound until nothing but feedback and the resonant frequencies of the space remain.  But unlike Room, which takes the composer’s own speech as its medium, the latter directs an orchestra to perform passages from Beethoven’s Consecration of the House (1822), which are then put through the same distorting process, transforming stately Sturm und Drang into glowing sonic soup.  And while the traditionalist might cringe at the dismantling of a respected masterwork into uncontrolled, alien noise, sitting in Crowell with those waves of turbulent sound shimmering all around me, I could not help wondering if I had ever heard anything like it.  I was astounded by the simple clarity of Lucier’s artistic vision: he had taken a classic, a fixture of Western art music, and made it utterly his own, fashioning the original and organic out of the familiar.  This, indeed, is why Lucier’s music is so challenging to describe, and why, on a certain level, it seems so natural: he shows us what we already know, but in a different light.

In all, the Alvin Lucier Celebration was a spectacular tribute to the life and work of a man who for more than half a century has done as much as anyone in shaping the progress of experimental music.  It was also a testament to the ongoing vitality of this tradition, both in the world at large and at Wesleyan in particular.  “It’s impossible to overstate his influence,” said Dr. Paula Matthusen, when I spoke with her several weeks ago about the Celebration and its significance to the arts at Wesleyan.  Matthusen, who this year took over for Lucier teaching the famous Introduction to Experimental Music, cites Lucier as a major influence on her own work.  “It’s about these very simple processes revealing something magical,”  she told me, reflecting on his music.  “There’s something very poetic about it.”  In 2006 and again in 2008, Matthusen put on a sound installation called Filling Vessels inspired by Lucier’s 1997 piece Empty Vessels, which, like much of his oeuvre, is based on the exploration of spatial acoustics.  Subsequently, just a few days after my conversation with Dr. Matthusen, I had the opportunity to speak with Andrea Miller-Keller, guest curator of the exhibition Alvin Lucier (and His Artist Friends) in the Zilkha Gallery (on display through December 11), who called the Celebration a “major event in contemporary music at Wesleyan.”  Both she and Dr. Matthusen noted that while the Celebration was first and foremost a retrospective on Lucier’s life and achievements, it was also promising as a springboard for the ideas of younger musicians, students and alumni both.  “I’m hoping it’ll be a big shot in the arm, like an intensive learning experience [for everyone involved],” Miller-Keller enthused.  Ultimately, it wound up being just that.  A considerable amount of new music dedicated to Lucier was débuted throughout the weekend, ranging from tributes by genre luminaries Robert Ashley, Gordon Mumma, Christian Wolff, Neely Bruce, and Pauline Oliveros (all of whom were present for the performances) to a flash mob rendition of Lucier’s 1968 piece Chambers by the students of this year’s MUSC 109.

The Celebration’s greatest moments, naturally, came during its four main concerts.  Each of these abounded with fantastic performances, but a handful stood out as particularly memorable.  The gloriously simple Silver Streetcar for the Orchestra (1988), which opened the Solos concert, was such a piece.  Scored for solo amplified triangle, it was performed by Brian Johnson, for whom it was originally written—and it was spellbinding.  Johnson’s incessant, carefully-amplified beating grew into a thick collage of sound, filling the hall with layer after layer of overtones running from the unpitched, metallic low end to the delicate melody of resonant tones that emerged as the music progressed.  Another highlight was the opener of the Ensembles concert, Music for Gamelan Instruments, Microphones, Amplifiers and Loudspeakers (1994).  A number of works performed last weekend were written to explore what Lucier called in the program notes his “fascination with the idea that pitch can create rhythm,” which occurs through the interaction of sound waves tuned at close intervals.  In these pieces, Lucier reinvents harmonic dissonance as a metrical device, harnessing it to open up previously ignored realms of sonic possibility.  Performed by the Wesleyan Gamelan Ensemble, this was the most compelling of any of these explorations, a juxtaposition of the feedback created by holding bonang gongs over microphones with the normal intonations of gendér metallophones.  “Since it is virtually impossible that a strand of feedback will match exactly on any fixed-pitch instrument,” Lucier explains in the program, “audible beats [will] occur.”  The combination of the impressively regulated feedback and the soft chords emanating from the gendérs gave rise to a splendidly pulsating soundscape, hollow yet solid, lustrous yet nocturnal.  Finally, while the entire third concert, a recreation of Lucier’s first performance at Wesleyan, was superb—at numerous points during the show, people literally got out of their seats and walked around to get a better look at the performance—I was most affected by John David Fullerman, John Pemberton, and Douglas Simon’s collaborative tape work Cariddwen (1968).  Like the forgotten evil twin of Steve Reich’s classic Come Out (1966), Cariddwen takes a short, sibilant passage from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and chops it up, stretching, jumbling, and overlaying the words into a mesmerizing cascade of speech and noise.

In addition to Dr. Matthusen and Ms. Miller-Keller, I had the privilege of doing a short interview with Lucier himself a week or so before the Celebration began.  I asked him some questions about his music, the event, and the arts at Wesleyan, and then turned to the perennial query that faces every creator of experimental art: How should we appreciate your work?  Lucier answered unhesitatingly.  “There’s something I used to tell my MUSC 109 [Intro to Experimental Music] class,” he told me.  “‘I’m not really interested in your opinions.  I’m interested in your perceptions.’”  He laughed, musing that that sounded a little harsher than he meant it.  “Just listen carefully,” he revised.  But appreciation did not seem to be an issue for the concertgoers I encountered last weekend; quite contrarily, the entire event was characterized by a tone of enormous regard for both the man and his music.  Exploration of the House was the final piece in the Ensembles concert on Saturday night, and after it had finished, Lucier made his way from the audience up to the stage.  As he mounted the steps, shook hands with the conductor and concertmaster, and waved to the crowd, the entire hall got to its feet, ending the night movingly with cheers and a standing ovation.  It was a fitting climax for the evening, and for the Celebration as a whole, for three days dedicated to honoring a man whose influence has changed music at Wesleyan forever and will continue to do so for many years to come.

Submit your art to Swerved by October 26

Swerved is an online communal database of Wesleyan creativity, and starting this November 7 they will be hosting an exhibition at the Zilkha Gallery. Students are encouraged to submit any kind of art for the show. All forms of creativity are welcome, such as video and sound, 2D/3D art, photography, prose and poetry. The deadline for submissions is Wednesday October 26. You can enter by submitting your work to the Swerved website, at which point it will be automatically considered for entry.

To submit, email your work to hello@swerved.org or to emailSWERVED@gmail.com. They ask that submissions be under 10MB and that your include your name, class year, the dimensions of the piece, the title and the medium. Submitters whose work is chosen will be informed by email, and a hard copy will be requested for display.

 

Creative Campus at the Student Activities Fair

Want to know what arts events are happening on campus? Are you involved in arts events and want to get the word out about them? Are you creative and want an outlet for that awesome expression? Or maybe you want to offer up your fresh take on what’s happening on this very creative campus.

This past spring, the Creative Campus website started in conjunction with the Center for the Arts. It was created collaboratively with Wesleyan students, artists, and staff. It is intended for anyone who wants to know what is going on with creative life on this vibrant and inspirational campus. It is a way of aggregating and collecting the creative life on campus, across disciplines, passions, departments, and student groups.

And speaking of student groups, Creative Campus will have a table at the Student Activities Fair! Come check us out to find out how you can get involved, to promote your student group through Creative Campus, or just to say hi. Hope to see you there!

Shira Engel ’14 reviews “Mixed Signals: Artists Consider Masculinity in Sports”

Shira Engel ’14 reviews “Mixed Signals: Artists Consider Masculinity in Sports”.

Catherine Opie: Josh (2007). Chromogenic print, 30 x 22 1/4 in. (76.2 x 56.5 cm). Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

In the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, a plethora of departments, interests, and values intersect in the Mixed Signals: Artists Consider Masculinity in Sports exhibit. This is a must-see exhibit for Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Sociology, African American Studies, and Anthropology majors, as well as all athletes and Friday Night Lights fans at this university. Basically, if you go to Wesleyan and engage in conversations concerning self and social expression, this exhibit can offer a new and intimate perspective on the age-old institution of American athletics.

The exhibit first takes the viewer through the stereotypes of the male athlete. It uses the art of exposure and reinterpretation as a socially subversive and critical agent of change. Adorning the walls of Zilka, you will find football jerseys, gym equipment, football helmets dangling from the ceiling, photography, paintings, and silent film. In both form and content, intersectionality is heavily present in Mixed Signals. It is, after all, the necessary by-product of a liberal arts education, which is known for interdisciplinary studies.

The multimedia approach creates a multisensory experience, allowing the viewer to experience the social stigma and expectations of masculinity in sports. This is art that is hyper-relevant to the Wesleyan student, as all aspects of the Mixed Signals exhibit have the power and potential to affect campus life.

Mixed Signals is on display through Sunday, October 23, 2011. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Sunday from Noon to 4pm, and on Friday from Noon to 8pm. Gallery admission is free.

Request for Proposals: Student Commission 2011-2012

The Center for the Arts is accepting proposals from Wesleyan students for the creation of a visual art work/performance connected to the Feet to the Fire: Fueling the Future theme. The proposal should consist of a project idea and timetable for a project to be created and executed by the end of each semester. One project will be awarded each semester. The Wesleyan University Creative Campus Committee will evaluate the proposals and the selection process will be based on the creativity of the submission, the connection to the Feet to the Fire theme, evidence of cross-disciplinary thinking and the feasibility of the project. Selectees will be awarded up to $250. The Center for the Arts will provide assistance in the realization of the selected projects.

Proposals should include:

  • 1-2 page written description
  • Timetable
  • Visual work should also include a visual representation of the proposed project such as a photograph or sketch (jpeg or pdf preferred)

Proposals for the fall semester are due by midnight on September 25, 2011.

Submit proposals to Program Manager Erinn Roos-Brown by email to eroosbrown@wesleyan.edu or delivered to the Center for the Arts office (located above Zilkha Gallery).

Summer in the City

Shira Engel ‘14 checks in from New York City.

So where do Wesleyan students go once school lets out? To Kenya to work at Shining Hope for Communities? To New Orleans to research the Gulf Coast oil spill? To work at their summer camps? To Russia/the South of France/Sweden? Yes, Wesleyan students will go to all of those places this summer, but first, they go to New York City, the home of a plethora of students and the future home of many more.

This summer, as I return home to the city, I find myself reuniting with friends from school. Last week, Emily Klein ’14 and I went to explore the latest installment of the High Line, which goes from West 20th to West 30th Streets. Originally constructed in the 1930’s for the elevation of freight trains, it was resurrected in 2009 with the opening of Section 1, which goes from Gansevoort to West 20th Street. It is an elevated park that features public art and an aerial view of the city.

The High Line is known as one of the rare places where New Yorkers go to do nothing. For two Wesleyan students, it is the equivalent of Foss Hill during finals week, an oasis in the midst of chaos. And it even looks like a campus in the sky, green and fresh plants balancing out the concrete we walk on. As we crossed the newest section of the High Line, we talked about the year to come and how we didn’t know why, but the experience of how being in the relaxation epicenter of New York reminded us of being at Wesleyan, surrounded by interesting people who spend their time in some of the most creative ways possible. What a great segue from a first year on campus to a summer in the city!