Art installations tell student stories

Students have taken over abandoned rooms in South Lab, transforming old offices into art projects as part of a senior art and design course.

Art and design professor Lyndal Osborne created the class last year in the hopes of combining students' skills from other art and design classes into one large project. "What I'm attempting to do in this class is have the students bring experience from their compartmentalized courses and their creative ideas together," she said.

Students are required to transform a room into a piece of art. Most often painting, sculptures, printmaking and lighting effects are used, though sometimes dance and theatrical elements are employed as well.

Student Kelly Johner's family was affected by the Mad Cow crisis and has made a poignant installation from hay bales and animal bones from her farm. Kristin Chrzanowski explores her family lineage using thread strung across the room. When you walk into Laura Muis' space, you find yourself looking up at lily pads and insects - a bottom-of-the-pond perspective influenced by her biology studies.

Growing up in a single-parent family that moved around a lot, first-year BFA student Daniel Godwin wanted to create a piece that centered around his upbringing, where nothing was permanent.

When you walk into his space, you see what could be a small furnished apartment, but everything has been covered with cardboard.

"We were always in a state of packing or unpacking, and that translated into me covering all the objects in my piece with cardboard. It's an attempt to display the permanence of a transient lifestyle," Godwin said.

Third-year BFA student Andrea Pinheiro took a different approach when she was first assigned her room: she walked around, examining every little mark and scratch on the walls and floor, and built her display around the room's history.

Finding an inscription on the wall indicating that a basin was for radioactive waste only, she was inspired to look at the idea of permanence in a building.

"Part of the process that I'm trying to show in my work is although no one's occupation is permanent, we still leave something behind," she said. Pinheiro has taken books donated by the library, painted them white and stuck them on the beige brick walls.

She also made plaster casts of other sinks in the building and hung them from the ceiling before splashing wax on the books, walls and floor.

In contrast to the room's paleness, little glass vials on the wall are filled with a metallic powder.

"I'm having material in these little vials pour out onto the floor, and I'm hoping that it will get on the viewer's shoes and they'll track it through the space, leaving evidence that they were here," Pinheiro explained.

Last year the class was held in the old greenhouse trailers, which have since been destroyed. Osborne found some abandoned offices in South Lab, and arranged use of the space for her class this year. As South Lab is scheduled for renovations next year, Osborne is seeking an alternate location to continue offering the class.

Although Osborne is retiring this spring, she has high hopes for the future of this course. 'What I'd like to see is a place where it can be set up as a legitimate art program, so we'd need a workshop and a dedicated instructor," she said.

The general public is invited to view the students' work from 9 a.m. - 9 p.m. April 6, in South Lab room 202. There will also be a reception from 7 - 9 p.m.