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Art students bring new awareness to old space |
| By
Chris Ankney |
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Oct 27, 2008
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The courtyard at the Center for the Visual Arts went mostly unnoticed by a majority of the students who used the space as a path to the parking lot — until now. Because of the work of nine art students, those tunnel-visioned walkers better pay attention or they’ll trip.
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| Posing for a photo with the installation titled "304" in the Center for the Visual Arts Courtyard are, from left, students Courtney Macklin, Victor Berrios, Helen Grubb, Shannon Huffman and Britney McIntire. |
The students, who are taking the Installation: Art of Place class taught by Barbara Miner, associate professor of art, were given the assignment to physically change a space to alter a viewer’s perception of it. Their work, “304,” is on display in the CVA courtyard on the Toledo Museum of Art Campus.
“This courtyard is always here, but no one ever pays attention to it,” class member Allison Schrinel said. “Now we’ve changed the space.”
To change the space, the students created 20 rectangular, wooden frames of four different sizes and buried the outside edges in the gravel courtyard. The still-visible inside edges of the frames were stained teal-blue to mimic the color of the 284 windows that surround the courtyard. The sizes of the frames are proportional to the windows.
The students said the goal of the piece was to get people to take notice of the space in a new way.
“Before, people would just walk this path to the door,” said class member Britney McIntire. “But now they have to move around the frames or they’ll trip.”
There are signs posted on the doors of the courtyard warning those entering to watch their steps. And even this change has people taking notice.
“I saw a few people who would look at the sign and then turn around and go another way,” Schrinel said, adding that annoyance or avoidance still count as artistic victories.
“They noticed it in some way,” she said.
Helen Grubb, another class member, said that is the main idea behind the work — not to have people contemplating its meaning, but just noticing its existence.
“The big thing is to pay attention,” Grubb said. “In order to be an artist, you have to be able to see things.”
“Each student studied the site, created an individual proposal for a work, presented it to the class during a group critique, and gave and received suggestions,” Miner said. “A vote was taken and they proceeded to construct the elements for the chosen piece. Through trial and error, serendipity led them to a much more elegant, less forced solution.
“While they created a beautiful and rather Zen-like addition to the courtyard, the product was not nearly as important as the process,” Miner continued. “They worked very smoothly together and did a terrific job.”
The installation will remain in place until the end of October.
Other members of the class who worked on “304” are Victor Berrios, Courtney Macklin, Shannon Huffman, Dean Bucher, Isaac Gould and Melissa Reed.
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