|
Sparking Art
On display in the Smith Warehouse this spring
were the works of nine students enrolled in "Image, Text,
and Visual Poetics," a class taught for the first time this
semester.
In the class, co-instructors Deborah Pope, professor of English,
and Merrill Shatzman, associate professor of the practice of visual
art, challenged students to explore the use of text through sculpture
and other three-dimensional mediums.
"Words acquire different layers of meaning when you think
of a word as having more than a flat dimension," Pope says. "We
wanted to see if we could strike two things together and produce
sparks."
Most of the students came to the class experienced in either drawing
or poetry. They worked on projects and exercises that merged the
two "to bring out greater possibilities of meaning," Pope
says. One activity, for example, involved projecting slides of
text onto a model's body. Students sketched the model with projected
words or wrote poetry about what they saw. "For every project,
students have taken it in really personal, individual directions," Pope
says.
Rita Bergman '06 created prayer flags to describe a childhood experience
with cancer. The work was more effective than a poem on paper,
Pope says. "You wouldn't have gotten the metaphor of freedom
and ascension that flags represented."
|
