The Student Center’s University Art Gallery is currently featuring the Iceland-inspired “ISLAND” exhibit.
The artists featured have all spent time in Iceland, and their works are their own interpretations of their time there. The exhibit has been on display since Oct. 31, and will continue through the semester until Dec. 12. The university gallery is partnering up with the Russell Industrial Centers cave gallery for this specific exhibit.
The exhibit is full of mysterious pieces requiring an open mind. Several of the pieces need a second glance, but upon review prove to be quite spectacular. Nicole Pietrantoni’s “This waterfall is falling for you” is a projection of an image and preserves a memory beyond basic photographic techniques.
“In this work I was interested in drawing attention to this beautiful place in the landscape – a popular tourist site – but also to the way that we see it – through a romantic lens,” said Pietrantoni. “I hope to draw attention to the fact that the very way we look at nature is very much a construction – it is shaped and distorted by many lenses and outside influences like tourism brochures, photographs and paintings, travel stories, etc.
“The Icelandic landscape is beautiful. However, from my time there I learned that what may feel like a private, subjective experience of beauty is actually very much socially constructed.”
The exhibit features an array of artistic style including, paint, photography, media and installation.
The use of sound is very intriguing in several of the pieces. The focal point of the exhibit is Hege Dons Samset’s “Worker Island,” a video playing in rotation. The sound of wind and birds from the footage can be heard throughout the gallery.
“The gallery is a fantastic place for students to learn about art,” said Gregory Tom, EMU’s gallery director. “Through it, students get to see work they otherwise would not have been able to. In the Island show we have 22 artists, many of them who live overseas, some of whom have never shown in the United States.
“We’re also reaching beyond EMU’s immediate campus with this show as we are collaborating with CAVE gallery in Detroit, which allows EMU to engage and be a part of the exciting art activity going on in Detroit.”
Artists Una Baldvinsdottir and Naomi Falk’s pieces feature textile materials.
“I think it’s really interesting how they take ordinary things like pants and transform them into something more thought provoking,” said freshman Chelsea Hollingsworth, the art gallery guard. “I really like the pants, and the huge sweater pieces.”
Some professors around campus have required students to expose themselves to the culture of art, much like freshmen Abbey Mattson’s creative writing class.
“For class, we had to go around the gallery, and create phrases, or responses to the art,” she said. “I wrote a piece on a response to Fiona Short’s piece in the corner. It’s an array of pictures that look like stars in the sky. It was my favorite.”
Next semester the university gallery will feature an exhibit from Evan Roth, a McAndless Scholar from March 7 – April 2, as well as the annual faculty exhibition which will include several forms of art, such as watercolor, print media, ceramics, fiber, and mixed media from Jan. 11-Feb. 15.
