 |
|
| Students find unique
employment in driving the AppalCART |
Becky
DiVerniero
Features Beat |
Jacque Lenz | The AppalachianSenior studio art majors Ben
Carter and Chris Davenport (not pictured) will present their
work at Looking Glass Gallery next semester. Through each others’
influences they depict their childhood experiences.
|
Senior studio art
majors Christopher L. Davenport and Benjamin G. Carter will share
a piece of themselves with students, faculty and staff this January
when they show their collaborative effort in a month-long exhibition
at the Looking Glass Gallery, located in W.H. Plemmons Student
Union.
The show will consist of mostly installation art, a form of sculpture.
The students are currently building two rooms to fit into the
gallery that will portray a childhood memory, Davenport said.
“The piece that we’re doing for Looking Glass has got
a lot to do with relaying experiences to other people and how
those people interpret them,” Davenport said. “What’s
going to be the outcome of the show is Ben’s relaying of
his experiences and then me incorporating those into my experiences
to interpret them in a visual way.” |
“It’s my childhood
memories funneled through him and then he creates them sculpturally
through memory,” Carter said. “It’s directly related
to a lot of the experience of college life. I’m dealing with
a lot of family issues that I had when I was a child and it specifically
deals with when my parents were getting divorced.”
“And there’s so many people that have gone through divorces
and are kids of divorces, that it’s hard not to relate to
it. It’s almost like we’re presenting America’s
facts through art. This is a subject that a lot of people relate
to and it’s going to be accessible.”
This will not be the first time the two have shown their work
to the public, said Carter.
“We’ve both shown our work outside of the school, but
it’s actually pretty hard to get the gallery inside the school,”
he said.
Phil Arnold, associate director of Student Programs and chair
of the Looking Glass Gallery committee, attributed the level of
difficulty to the committee’s desire to make the experience
part of the learning process.
“We treat the application and review process as professionally
as possible,” Arnold said. “We consider Looking Glass
a professional gallery and we want to replicate the real world
experience.”
The selection committee is composed of students, faculty and staff,
who review the four to five proposals submitted every semester.
Each proposal must include an artist statement, describing what
they plan to show through their art and slides of their work.
Any student, regardless of major can apply, Arnold said.
“We need to see unity and balance [within the work],”
Arnold said. “With [Davenport and Carter], their submission
was unique. We don’t get a lot of installation proposals.
We also thought it had the ability to provide a response from
the viewer.”
Both Davenport and Carter said they have always been interested
in art, both citing different but equally influential high school
teachers that pushed their interests to the next level.
“I started making art at a young age and by the time I got
to high school I knew that’s what I wanted to do,” Carter
said. “I had a really good art teacher that told me that
I could [do it]. So ever since then I’ve been doing ceramics.”
“I had a real good art teacher as well,” Davenport said.
“It influenced me greatly. Other than that, my peers and
just other artists that I come across in books, Ben has been a
big influence.”
“Out of the people I know, [the most influential] have been
people that aren’t artists,” Carter said. “I very
much connect my art to spirituality, and I have a good friend
that’s a Buddhist priest that’s helped me out a lot
and been very influential.
“I have some friends [at home] that aren’t artists that
have kind of related their life experience to mine and that’s
given me more insight into myself. People like Chris, people I
work with have been a big influence.”
“With my art in general, I try to make pottery that can help
people interact directly with an object,” Carter said. “A
lot of times when we eat nowadays, or anything we do is kind of
secondary. We learn things from the Internet and that’s not
real, that’s like an intermediary.
“So the pots that I make and the work that I do is very much
about how do you have a real life relationship with an object
or with people through that object. So instead of us communicating
by email through a computer, my hope is that people will communicate
over a meal through my pottery.”
The pair stressed that students will benefit by attending the
show.
“I think it is important for people to know that art is accessible
to them, especially in a university environment where everyone
is getting educated,” Davenport said. “I think it’s
good to have that well-rounded perspective that art can provide.
It’s important to take advantage of it while it’s so
accessible.” |
|
|
 |
 |
