Artscape

Faculty Meeting

By Claudine Isé

"Learning German, Kugelschreiber" by Ian Ruffino

As you're making plans to hit the big fall shows at the Columbus Museum of Art and the Wexner Center over the coming weeks, don't forget to check out some of the smaller college and university galleries nearby.

The Hopkins Hall Gallery + Corridor at OSU's College of the Arts, for example, just kicked off its season with its latest Visiting Artists/Lecturers Exhibition. It features works by each of the 24 lecturers and two visiting artists teaching in the Department of Art this year.

Lecturers are selected by faculty review from a pool of new and recent MFAs. Most are OSU Department of Art grads, but a fair number also hail from graduate art programs elsewhere. All are hired on a part-time, quarterly basis.

In contrast, visiting artists are hired for the academic year and are also encouraged to produce new artworks during their stay.

Noted glass artist Joel O'Dorisio (who earned his BFA from OSU in 1991) and emerging painter Hannah Barnes, a freshly-minted graduate of Rutgers' graduate art program, are this year's visiting artists.

In the main gallery space, O'Dorisio exhibits a spectacular new cast-glass sculptural installation. It consists of a tree stripped of its bark and encircled by a roughly six-foot-high column of trapezoidal glass bricks that artificially simulate the tree's absent outer layer. Tiny glass fruits dangle temptingly from its branches as miniature plastic army men look on from below.

O'Dorisio described the piece as "a conversation between nature, humanity, architecture and the way we live today."

Artworks included in this exhibition have all been chosen by the artists themselves, and it's up to longtime Hopkins Hall gallery curator Prudence Gill to work her special brand of magic during installation, to ensure that all of the pieces play nicely together.

One of the things that printmaker Ian Ruffino likes about exhibiting in this context is the opportunity to show works that are still in progress—something he says he wouldn't feel as comfortable doing in a commercial gallery.

Ruffino's prints are formed from different layers of materials, such as dryer lint, thread and acrylic paint. Since the underlying strata usually can't be seen once the piece is completed, displaying work in an unfinished state is akin to pulling back the curtains to reveal what's going on behind the scenes.

Other lecturers, like Sarah Weinstock, enjoy the motivational "kick in the pants" that an early fall exhibition provides.

Weinstock, who teaches painting, drawing and Photoshop, makes drawings and videos whose swirling forms bring to mind mitochondria and other cellular structures. In this exhibition, Weinstock shows a video that captures what happens when she shines a flashlight across a tableau of unidentifiable objects, creating a projection of moving shadows against a nearby wall.

In variety, the exhibition ranges from Sky Shineman's gossamer oil on glassine paintings to a lumpy, conical-shaped sculpture Ryan Agnew punningly calls Depends. This pile of goopy white stuff looks wet, but is actually formed from the absorbent cotton lining of adult diapers.

Agnew pointed out that the lecturer/student dynamic sometimes mirrors the kind of thinking that goes into his own artistic investigations.

Weinstock seconded this notion. "[Teaching] allows me to take questions that I've posed to my students and turn them around on myself," she observed.

"At its best, [the classroom] is like a big laboratory, a testing ground where everyone is asked to come up with solutions," said Agnew.

The same could be said of group shows like this one. Since college galleries tend to cycle through exhibitions quickly, they can be easy to miss. That would be a shame here. This is a great opportunity to see a lot of terrific work by some of the most interesting artists working in the city today.

September 20th, 2007

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