Daniel Bruggeman
Pose is an artistic response to a developing collection of student drawings currently in the art department’s possession. In the fall of 2011 the Studio Art Department Drawing Studio moved to the Weitz Center for Creativity. As I prepared to shift from Boliou to the Weitz, it became clear that we had amassed an impressive selection of student drawings over the past ten years. These drawings, informally obtained, were tucked away in drawers, offices or portfolios. Specific works were regularly pulled out to demonstrate a particularly well-executed technique to current students. The growing student figure drawing collection now enjoys a more formal home in the flat files located in the new Drawing Studio.
For Pose, I attended figure drawing sessions throughout the summer and completed nearly 100 sheets using the same drawing techniques I teach at Carleton. Selected drawings, along with a video produced for this project, are installed together with the student works that inspired them.
Kelly Connole
In a quiet room in the basement of Hulings Hall, wooden cabinets are filled with glistening skulls, beautifully mounted birds, a horse hoof with the shoe still firmly attached, wonderful things floating in jars, and the occasional oddball item contained in a cigar box or coffee can.
My investigation of the Carleton College Collections has focused on these items in the Biology Department. The oddities in their collection, and the vessels and boxes that house them, are what interest me most.
I am a collector of both natural and human-made things. Some of the materials used in these pieces have occupied my studio space and my home for many years. I share my space with examples of beauty, decay, and curiosity as I celebrate the connections between the visual feasts that surround me. This exhibition allowed me to pull from my vast library of reference material to make new work and re-contextualize bits from my collection.
Fred Hagstrom
Gould Library is an inexhaustible source for starting points leading to long projects. The slave ship diagram from Clarkson’s 1808 book on slavery is a stark image and the source for Passage, a large multi-paneled wall piece that took about two months to execute.
In Paradise Lost, I wanted to do a book on nuclear testing in the Pacific because of my time there for the Studio Art in the South Pacific off-campus study program. Southern Cross is one of my favorite wordless novels. It has a blunt sense of outrage over how Pacific Islanders were treated in the past. No Place to Hide was written by a member of the radiological team conducting the first nuclear tests around Bikini Island. The book gradually reveals how unprepared the scientists were for the extremely high levels of radiation released by tests which ultimately destroyed the islanders’ way of life.
My time in the South Pacific also inspired Standing Place. Since 1996, I have taken students to a Maori settlement in New Zealand’s Waipoua forest. Over 200 Carleton students have lived for a short time on this marae (meeting place). The book Ned and Katina tells the remarkable story of the couple that founded this community. Patricia Grace, one of New Zealand’s best-known novelists, wrote her only non- fiction book about this family that I hold dear.
David Lefkowitz
For Ibid., I have reimagined the Carleton campus in works based on models, blueprints, and plans of college architecture dating back to the earliest buildings on campus. These materials are housed in The Plan Room, a vast yet cramped repository of artifacts squirreled away in the central core of the facilities building.
The two cardboard wall pieces presented here add an academic slant to a series of structures I’ve been depicting for several years. I draw idealized “plans” for structures that are at once monumental, implying the permanence of architecture, yet provisional, as stacks of cardboard boxes. The makeshift dwellings in my drawings hint at two impulses animating adaptive re-use: Like childrens’ forts, these suggest an architecture of possibility, using the cardboard box as basic unit for play and invention. Simultaneously, the wall pieces reference an architecture of necessity in which the cardboard box becomes a rudimentary shelter for the homeless.
I reference building types embodying conflicting notions about how an academic institution represents itself through architecture. Residence Hall emphasizes the Gothic-tinged traditional campus ideal by suggesting Nourse Hall, the conceptual template for Cassatt and Memorial Halls. Cultural Institution: Loading Dock Entrance invokes the pastiche of modernist elements that informs the postmodern Weitz Center design.
In the Plan Room, a series of watercolors, is based loosely on photos I took documenting the facilities department document repository. These pictures of campus models painted in a deadpan illustrational manner pose questions about the relationship between an actual space and its representation.
Stephen Mohring
In recent work I’ve become interested in combining the visceral nature of traditional well-crafted materials with the seductive allure of time-based media. I try to build stoppages in the routine of the day, objects that help us remember where our feet are, and forget—if only for a moment—where we need to go. I have tried to make objects that bring awareness back to the body. At their best these constructions remind viewers that they are not only observers but also physical participants in a shared space, that their bodies matter, and that meaning can and must be derived physically.
The work in this show is a meditation on the transformation of wood from tree to hand-made object. All of the wood has been locally sourced, milled at Carleton, and worked primarily with hand tools.
Linda Rossi
Through the lens of my Brownie Hawkeye camera, I staged a photograph of a cardinal in a tree outside my bedroom window. I placed a glass of water with my drawing pencil submerged at an angle on the window’s ledge. The click of the shutter revealed a rather fuzzy image of light refraction and a cardinal sitting on my broken drawing pencil. I was ten years old and thought art and science made a good team.
For Ibid., I looked at stuffed birds and skulls in the arboretum collection and glass lantern slides and beetles from the biology department. The relationship between sight and touch became my focus. First, I built a small model of the eye, Aqueous Chamber. Next, I used the dark chamber of the camera to capture numerous birds, including the hawk flying through my back woods, a blue jay on the head of a red-bellied woodpecker, and a blind barred owl.
For the sense of touch, I covered light boxes and the book Into the Heart of Darkness with Braille blocks known as cells. I painted branches, which had been carved by engraver beetles. The woodpecker will often reveal a kind of beautiful and yet often destructive calligraphy, as it searches for this beetle tunneling deeply beneath the tree’s bark. With its keen eyesight, the owl will occasionally capture the woodpecker and the hawk will capture the owl.