We have established our own ideas of what home means: home is a place where our families spend time together watching movies on the old sofa. But it never occurred to us that there is more to home than furniture, for instance, the dirt that accumulates under our beds and couches. Doesn’t that make up home as much as our furniture does? Meredith Hoy, assistant professor of contemporary art in the College of Liberal Arts, explained this to me.
Hoy is one of the curators of Mediating Place, a show running until Oct. 25 at the Harbor Art Gallery. When asked why she picked the theme and the exhibitors, Hoy stated that she wanted artists who “challenge your notions of space, place and location; art that makes you look at stuff that you might sometimes miss or ignore.”
Ann Torke, studio art professor one of the displaying artists, brings us back to the idea of accumulated dirt being part of what makes up the home. Her series “Residue” includes stovetops from her home that she decided not to clean for a month. Torke also picked up all the junk lying in her front yard and the dust inside her house, and then cast it in resin.
According to Hoy, Torke’s work is “focusing on the things we normally forget or aren’t paying attention to, like trash, dust and dirt, which makes up home just as much as other things do. It’s a different version of place.”
If you go to the Harbor Art Gallery you’ll see small screens with images of landscapes, which are Jane Prophet’s “Model Landscape.” “In a nutshell, the work plays with ideas about models [or] model, as in things that are smaller than that to which they refer… and models as the ideal version of a thing (like ‘model’ student),” says Prophet. Her work focuses on a double idealization, where she uses a model and cuts a picture out of it.
Dyllan Nguyen’s “The Sound of Closeness” generates sound according to your surroundings. For instance, if there’s a crowd behind you the sound gets louder. Sometimes we tend to determine the boundaries of place by using our vision, but we can also determine it through sound.
For example, you walk into a bar and you notice that you are changing your location because you see different scenery. But you are not only looking at the different setting; you feel the difference of location through sound as well. What Nguyen is trying to get us to understand is that vision isn’t everything: sound also plays a big role in determining the limit of a place.
Also featured in the exhibit is ecoarttech’s “Eclipse,” which Hoy explains is “a photograph of national parkland, which we normally think of as totally pristine and pure-separate form urban life. We don’t think of pollution being at work in wilderness spaces as it is in urban places.”
The images in the ecoarttech tent help you interpret the air quality and level of pollution in the park. The ecoarttech exhibit opens our eyes to the impurity of parks and helps us realize that they aren’t as untainted as we thought.
Hoy does a great service bringing these different artists with the same initial focus together to make us realize there is more to what we see on a daily basis. Mediating Place has interesting works of art that will ultimately force you to think about the forgotten. The artists picked by Hoy will attract even those less artsy people, myself included.
So what are you waiting for? The show is only up until Oct. 25! The Harbor Art Gallery is located on the first floor of the McCormack building.
