Grad students not bound by paper in weekend exhibit
>>Print ViewPublication Date: 11/23/2009
sponsored by
At one event this weekend, uninhabited space shifts and changes the building walls and minds of attendees.
A Purdue graduate art installation, hosted Friday through Sunday in Battle Ground, Ind., challenged artists to utilize the space of three local buildings.
Lafayette Lions Club, a local barn and a weigh station were furnished with pieces designed according to the physical boundaries and various environmental elements of the surroundings.
Artist Micah Bowers, a graduate student, created a manifestation of a living organism that vegetated in the walls of buildings and infested the floors with its greasy residue, pouring out of the ancient wall’s air vent.
Railroad tracks and asphalt streets in Battle Ground had a pair of yellow shoes that demonstrated empiricism and took a practical object out of its expected purpose to be used with a different function, instituted by Jung-un Choi.
Another designer and graduate student, Mara Battiste, navigated her foreign space into a larger-than-life dream world of a child’s nighttime imagination. Labeling her art “Analog Girl, Digital World,” Battiste incorporated objects from a child’s room that brought adults back to their rooms in their grandmothers’ houses and sparked kids’ zealous creativity.
“I added objects that I had when I was young, like the animal and star books and the fort I would make to read them with my flashlight in my bed,” Battiste said.
In her installation, Battiste also recorded the audio from the passing train in the town and the fuzzy analog television, so the psychological levels and mental associations are much more complex when entering her room.
Emilie Fleagle, a sophomore in the College of Liberal Arts, was startled at first by the sounds and gloomily lit room, but after seeing the ballerina lamp, quickly understood the scene.
Fleagle was eager to see the other installations under the title “Borrowed Ground.”
“I’ve seen beautiful art and I’ve seen art that could be labeled very bizarre, but these pieces directed by architecture were definitely unusual,” Fleagle said. “It was art that was harder for an amateur artist to wrap their mind around, but it was so intriguing that I couldn’t get my eyes off of the all the creations.”