Faculty, staff display personal works in new SE exhibit
by Brian Shults, se news editor

    Art department faculty members display their personal works in the exhibit fifteen through Friday, Feb. 8, in the Art Corridor II and discussed their work at a lecture last week.

   The exhibit begins somberly with Tower Melt by Chris Goebel, art department director. The piece depicts two curved, thin towers, which imminently appear to be crashing toward the ground. The sides of the towers are lined with windows from depression-era tin toys, Goebel said.

   “The bending towers give us the image of the collapse as it is happening. There is a sense of them being unfettered,” he said.

   The lecture began with Lee Bowman discussing The Delusion of Self Healing, his depiction of a cross with an image of his face and various objects including hands and feathers.

   “Self Healing is part of a series of iconographic art that all have a high symbol contact value,” Bowman said.

   P lacing his head in a scanner to create a picture of his face resulted in a digital image that leaves an apparition quality to his features. Surrounding his face are hands.

   “Those hands are reaching for an object they cannot reach; on top are growth that cannot grow and feathers that cannot fly,” he said.

   “I believe that we cannot heal ourselves without a higher power. I do not think we can heal ourselves without help,” he said.

   Bowman described Picasso and Pooch Reclining on Red Couch as a take on Picasso’s portraits of abstracted women on furniture, except it features him and a dog.

   Sharon Covington displayed pictures also relating to Sept. 11. In Stay Strong, vividly colored purple gravel rocks outline two hands reaching toward each other, but separated by a map of Long Island, N.Y.

   Her work is underscored with images of nature and man-made objects by combining two and three-dimensional objects.

   “I like to explore the relationship between body and landscape. I believe nature gives and culture takes,” she said.

   Covington also is displaying a digital collage, Remember September. It features several images including an airplane, the towers and a pair of eyes peering out of the corner looking at the blur of everything about to take place.

   “Remember September is made of all borrowed images except a picture of the World Trade Center, which I took two summers ago,” she said.

   John Frost, exhibit director, explores the unique mediums of domestic furniture and their relationship to human activity and natural stains, such as rust and soap scum.

   “Objects like chairs and other domestic images that deal with comfort are what I am in the process of discovering. We do not think about the function they provide on a day-to-day basis,” Frost said.

   One of his works, sixteen chairs, consists of miniature chairs lined along the wall in every conceivable angle.

   Another interest of Frost’s lately has been shower curtains, which he uses in a piece titled, clean tub. The fogged curtain has the word clean, scrawled over it and is placed over a small outline of a bathtub.

   “The reason I am interested in shower curtains is that everything on the outside becomes muted, blurred shapes. The gradation from translucent to opaque is an everyday process in life,” he said.

   Encompassing a darker and more gothic style, Doris Gardner says, “My art deals with positive death imagery.”

   “I was in an artist’s circle, and we discussed the tarot and all the different meanings. Other artists have done their own tarot deck, so I decided to create my own tarot deck. I want to approach it from the perspective of the fool’s journey through the deck,” she said.

   One such picture, Card XV: The Devil, is a painting depicting a bull-man figure holding one hand out representing all the people who discouraged her art and the other holding an object representing determination, she said.

   Goebel’s Point of Entry is also featured.

   “I’ve fallen in love with pattern, which may have been the bane of artists over the past 10 years,” he said.

   Entry is a work of camouflaged forest patterns with hunting targets across the top and bottom. The print wraps around the corner of the wall showing a tree exactly at the corner.

   “The trick is because of the tree at the corner and the end, you cannot gain entry,” he said.

   Michael Jeffery explores sculpture for the first time in two pieces, Rotary Phone and Escape.

   Rows of brown lunch bags with the word tiger printed on them are enclosed behind a cage in Escape and an oversized telephone with the receiver on the ground in Rotary Phone.

   Rafael Molina describes his work as “utilitarian (for human use) vessel pottery.”

   The process of firing the pottery in sodium makes the pottery much more durable and useful in utilitarian form, Molina said.

   “My motivation is simple. It is the pursuit of beauty in the content of form. Dostoevski said, ‘Beauty will save the world.’ I hope so,” he said.

   Dana Strittmatter uses expressionistic paintings to “take time to nurture the person inside.”

   “The canvas represents a safe area, and I hope to enlarge the canvas and explore an area that is less safe,” she said.

   Beata Szechy concluded the lecture. Szechy came to America 15 years ago from a college in Budapest.

   “People ask me, ‘Are you a painter?’ And I say, ‘I am an artist.’ I explore something, and then I want to step further into another form (of art),” she said.

   Szechy’s work is a lithograph painted over a silk screen in “furniture cover motifs.”

   Other artists featured in the exhibit, but not at the lecture, include John Phillips, Earline Green, Dana Provence, Susan Friedman and Dana Hamrick.