A World of Weird
Recent Show at Fine Arts Gallery
Leslie Chappelle
Issue date: 2/19/02 Section: A&E
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By Leslie Chappelle
ET CONTRIBUTOR
The weird sculptural forms hanging around the Fine Arts Center since the end of fall semester are the final project of Katrina Wagner’s 2-D Art Fundamentals class. Students were privileged to launch into the 3-D world and create life-sized humanoids.
The project guidelines: spend no more that $10 for found materials and transform them into would-be human forms. Most students spent hours rummaging through bins of metal at Urban Ore in Berkeley, an urban recycling place, visualizing the innards of a television set as a brain system or rubber hose as possible intestines.
Allison Taylor combined a gasoline can, a metal ladder, a large, round tray, some thin, corrugated pipe, a bicycle wheel and spiral wire into her sculpture. She found the visualization mind moving. Taylor began her studies at College of Marin in 1993, transferred to Santa Barbara City College and returned to the Kentfield campus last fall.
Gi Gi Nelson transformed a ruptured television set, electrical conduit, a drainpipe, rubber rings, and possibly pieces of a lawn lounge into an expressive apparition. Nelson considered it a fine project, and liked the suggestion from Wagner to “let the material speak to you of shape and human size.” The freedom and spontaneity was fun.
Taylor Walsh gathered her material from Urban Ore, and enjoyed sorting through “junk”, choosing forms she liked. Those forms appear to be louvered doors to a cabinet or window, the long handle of a cleaning device with a rubber hand-grip, a telephone set, and thin wire forming a circle wrapped with white plastic surrounding a red can with stuffing sprouting from the top, with all of this mounted on a tricycle. It was attaching her work to the tricycle that required to greatest effort and ingenuity, Walsh confided. She has taken two courses from Wagner and has her Associates Degree in Fine Arts. Walsh plans to transfer to another college and study for a BA. Her career interest is in advertising.
There are many other startling sculptures in the group whose creators are currently unknown. No comparison can be made with forms of the past years. At the end of each fall semester, weird apparitions appear in Wagner’s class. Will this become a COM tradition?
ET CONTRIBUTOR
The weird sculptural forms hanging around the Fine Arts Center since the end of fall semester are the final project of Katrina Wagner’s 2-D Art Fundamentals class. Students were privileged to launch into the 3-D world and create life-sized humanoids.
The project guidelines: spend no more that $10 for found materials and transform them into would-be human forms. Most students spent hours rummaging through bins of metal at Urban Ore in Berkeley, an urban recycling place, visualizing the innards of a television set as a brain system or rubber hose as possible intestines.
Allison Taylor combined a gasoline can, a metal ladder, a large, round tray, some thin, corrugated pipe, a bicycle wheel and spiral wire into her sculpture. She found the visualization mind moving. Taylor began her studies at College of Marin in 1993, transferred to Santa Barbara City College and returned to the Kentfield campus last fall.
Gi Gi Nelson transformed a ruptured television set, electrical conduit, a drainpipe, rubber rings, and possibly pieces of a lawn lounge into an expressive apparition. Nelson considered it a fine project, and liked the suggestion from Wagner to “let the material speak to you of shape and human size.” The freedom and spontaneity was fun.
Taylor Walsh gathered her material from Urban Ore, and enjoyed sorting through “junk”, choosing forms she liked. Those forms appear to be louvered doors to a cabinet or window, the long handle of a cleaning device with a rubber hand-grip, a telephone set, and thin wire forming a circle wrapped with white plastic surrounding a red can with stuffing sprouting from the top, with all of this mounted on a tricycle. It was attaching her work to the tricycle that required to greatest effort and ingenuity, Walsh confided. She has taken two courses from Wagner and has her Associates Degree in Fine Arts. Walsh plans to transfer to another college and study for a BA. Her career interest is in advertising.
There are many other startling sculptures in the group whose creators are currently unknown. No comparison can be made with forms of the past years. At the end of each fall semester, weird apparitions appear in Wagner’s class. Will this become a COM tradition?