Artist’s exhibit focuses on childhood memories

By Sarah Szczepanski
Assistant Features Editor

Artist Jill Downen's childhood home had no 90-degree angles. Things in the older home were constantly breaking down and in need of repair. She remembers a time when her father yelled out in sheer frustration, "Nothing in this house is square!"

Being a teen at the time, this struck Downen. "I thought 'well wait a second, if I live in a house where nothing is square, then maybe nothing is totally stable,'" she said.

It was with this influence that she produced "Jill Downen: Anxious Architecture," which is on display through Sept. 14 in the Ralph G. Beekle Gallery in Creative Arts Building 2.

The exhibit is based on Downen's childhood memories and domestic architecture.

It includes a warped glass staircase, a glass dropped ceiling and a rendition of her dining room floor, which entailed, for three months, spending three to four hours a day carving out a design with an Exact-o knife.

The exhibit can fall under the category of Installation Art, which basically means the artist takes a space in the environment, mixes it up, and makes the environment look the way that he or she wants it to look, according to Charles Gick, assistant professor of painting and drawing.

"I'm interested in how that space can become fused in our mental space, our memory or imagination — our revelry," Downen said. "So, in that respect, when you see a staircase, or when you see a dropped ceiling, they are both real and imaginary at the same time."

"We know it is a real staircase because it misers actual staircase dimensions; it’s the size of the same staircase you would find at home, but at the same time there is nothing real about it. You can't walk up it, it can't support your weight and it's made of completely untrue angles."

She said she is trying to twist the grid upon which most architecture is measured from.

For example, her father installed a drop ceiling when she was young, and she remembers looking up at the ceiling. The wires dangled down and she watched him attach the grid work that held the panels in place.

"So, I have this memory of the grid in the space above my head, but I have this adult reaction where I am on purpose breaking that grid," said Downen.

"My work straddles the boundaries between what is real and what is imaginary."

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