Yale Bulletin and Calendar

October 6, 2006|Volume 35, Number 5

Exhibit of artists at work
explores creative process

The first exhibition at the School of Art since Robert Storr became its dean will allow visitors to watch four artists at work for one week, Oct. 10-17, followed by a two-week show of the work they produced, Oct. 17-Nov. 8.

Titled "Making Do" and curated by Samuel Messer, associate dean of the School of Art, the exhibit will explore the creative process as much as the object (or performance) that is being created. Moreover, since the artists will be limited to working with materials they have chosen beforehand, the exhibition will traverse the "middle ground" between mixing, matching and mismatching an infinite variety of materials and inventing from whatever materials are randomly available.

Storr, a leading curator and critic as well as an artist, sees the exhibition as exemplifying "neither a return to the purist traditional concept of 'truth to materials' nor to the purist modernist one of 'less is more,'" which, he argues, "tends towards pragmatic invention with whatever may be at hand, and responds imaginatively to the relative quantity or scarcity of it."

What each artist produces in this exhibition, says Storr, "can be an art of 'muchness' or an 'ultra povera' art of extreme spareness, it can be lasting or totally ephemeral. In essence, though, it consists of anything the artist chooses to do while making do with a given material of his or her choice."

The four young artists invited to participate in this exhibition/demonstration -- Mark Borthwick, Luis Gispert, Geoff McFedridge and Karyn Olivier -- work in a range of media and genres, including performance art.

With the exception of Gispert, who earned his M.F.A. in sculpture in 2001 from the School of Art, the artists will be working in studios that are unfamiliar to them, and they will be available to respond to visitors' questions as they create.

Both phases of this difficult-to-classify exhibition will be open to the public free of charge 10 a.m.-6 p.m. weekdays Oct. 10-Nov. 8 at the Green Hall Gallery, 1156 Chapel St.

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