The Faculty Exhibition at the Bell Gallery in the List Art Center gives students the opportunity to glimpse their professors' own skill and creativity.
Upon entering the building, two enormous paintings are immediately striking: one by Associate Professor of Art Leslie Bostrom, who chairs the visual art department, and another by former visiting painting instructor Kirsten Lamb.
Bostrom's approximately 7-by-9-foot oil painting, "Studies for Bird Disaster #10," envelops the viewer in a suburban landscape from the perspective of birds. The piece is simultaneously simple and complex. The spare but bright color on the canvas, the inscriptions in childish handwriting and the family out on their front lawn in the background exude a happy and almost cute tone. But the inscriptions describing the birds' dilemmas and the exaggerated scale of the figures speak to the tragic as well.
Lamb's piece, "A Pile of Cliches and Dead Things," overwhelms the viewer with a crowded pile of human sculls, slabs of meat, rich desserts and deer heads among other elements on a massive canvas. The work is both beautiful and disgusting, mirroring what seems to be Lamb's exploration of the food chain and consumption.
In addition to paintings, the exhibition features faculty works including drawings, sculptures, prints, video art, photography, computer animation and Web-based projects.
Especially distinctive was Professor of Art Walter Feldman's "Maya Stele," a long canvas covered in traditional Mayan designs but in untraditional metallic colors. The work gets more intricate with each look as subtle details reveal themselves - even in the black background. Feldman's piece appeals not only on an aesthetic level but also raises interesting questions about appropriation in art.
Equally thought-provoking were Visiting Lecturer in Visual Arts Jay Stuckey's series of five drawings of airplanes and missiles. With simultaneously disturbing and adorable names such as "What's a Little Reign?" the aerial battle scenes are displayed as if intended for a child's bed sheets with bright colors and cartoonish lines.
Assistant Professor of Visual Arts Paul Myoda's "Rogue Wave" combines man and machine in a computer-aided, laser-cut and hand-bent sculpture. The striking aluminum fork-like construction eerily creeps down over a doorway from the top of the ceiling and speaks to some sort of industrial monster image.
As a whole, the Faculty Exhibition illustrates the diversity of the visual art professors as artists. The intellectual inquisitiveness of the department shines through in its faculty's works.
