Brant Gallery is pleased to announce the Project Wall. Project Wall is the exterior wall of the Brant Gallery that acts as an extension of the gallery programming. This inaugural project, titled Reversible, is a response to the concept surrounding the Garden Lab. Reversible will be on view from March 16 through March 30, 2012.
Participating student-artists: Rachel Braun, Amy Concannon, Juliet Demasi, Yurikou Diza, Minsung Kim, Tara Kovalik, Stephanie McFadden, Katerina Michelakis, Noelle Nanto, Samuel Peckham, Denia Silva, Jaimie Varasconi, William Weygint and Edward Monovich, Visiting Lecturer.
In our class “Space and Artistic Vision,” we seek compelling three-dimensional illusion, spatial vibration and ambiguity. Working collaboratively, we created this variable drawing to dialogue with “Garden Lab.” The installation was constructed completely from found and recycled materials, which were harvested by students beginning in week 3. Students were charged with foraging through city parks, recycle and trash bins and old drawings bound for the dumpster. This drawing installation is a vehicle for experimenting with spatial properties of scale, texture, pattern and color intensity, and the phenomenon of reversibility. We are concomitantly discussing issues inherent to our recycled materials. Our questions include: What role does sustainability play in contemporary art? What does artistic medium say about its culture of origin? Are there relationships between materials and privilege? Are there properties of scale and medium that relate to gender? How does working collaboratively affect the content of the piece?
Through our use of found and recycled materials, this project focuses attention on levels of consumption (particularly in the art world), and how scale and media relate to quantity of waste. Our goals include fostering open ended discussion about artistic space and its relationship to sustainability, while breaking arbitrary trends of consumption and forging deeper relationships between materials and content. Over the course of a two week period, this installation will change and examine new spatial possibilities, while incorporating newly discovered “treasures.”
*Detail of student collage from found elements, by Stephanie McFadden.
