By Alyssa Serrano
Staff Writer
The College’s Article Gallery had the opening night of their latest gallery of student works on Nov. 8.
The theme of this gallery was “Transformation,” with students coming together to create multifaceted works of art. Throughout the week that the gallery is open the students will continue working on their works so that no two weeks have the same pieces.
Besides the pieces themselves changing, they also will be having different performers perform at the gallery each week. For their opening night the College, the Guitar Ensemble performed.
Elizabeth Mackie, professor of fine art and photography, and Teresa Nakra, chair of the design and creative technology department, came together for the first time to teach the class, “Image-Movement-Sound Lab,” which is where students developed their ideas into what is currently being displayed.
"Teresa is from a music background, and I do installation and visual art, so we are from completely different worlds," said Mackie. "We have people from different classes and majors who never had the opportunity to work together before learning how to collaborate with each other and developing unique ideas."
The pieces were very interactive; one such piece began the night with all of its pieces together and at the same level. However, as the night continued, audience members were able to move rocks that were attached to individual pieces, thus creating an entirely different image than how it looked at the start of the show. In doing this it also allowed for the work to catch the light from the room at different angles which created real beautiful projections on the wall and floor.
Despite the changes being made throughout the night and the runtime of the show, there were a lot of changes that occurred before the audience was able to see these works.
Matthew Stokes, a senior interactive multimedia major, is one of the students in the class displaying his work from the class in the gallery. On the night of, he presented a video game, however, he started the project planning something completely different.
“I initially did a painting, but it just wasn’t working out, and I originally didn’t want to do a game because I had a lot of ideas and it got really big but the class really encouraged me to do (it) and allowed me to expand on my ideas and figure out where I wanted the project to go,” said Stokes.
Stokes wasn’t the only student leaving his comfort zone, Rachael Dewey, a junior art education major, took up something completely new to her and weaved for her project.
“It was definitely a learning curve because I had never worked with a loom or done any weaving before, so working on such a large scale was difficult,” Dewey said, “but it was really rewarding and I’m excited to add more as the gallery continues.”
The gallery is open until Dec. 8, and the student’s works will keep growing and changing up until then.
