Face it - you're stressed. You've got to write a 20-page paper by next Wednesday and you have a midterm coming up in your fiction class. It's so close you can smell the freshly photocopied pages (and there are a lot of them).
You haven't even begun to read the 20 short stories, and while the reading holiday might be enough time to get half of them done, forget relaxing. Every path of your life seems to be merging together into one large mess, and there is no way you'll get out of it with any brains left.
Chill out. That's how your life is supposed to be. Embrace it, ponder it and most importantly, forget about it! Take time out to go see an art exhibit.
Art is made for reflection. And with the schedule you've got, you need some heavy reflecting. The Fayerweather Gallery is the perfect place to contemplate life's troubles. Located right next to the Bayly Art Museum on Rugby Road, you can pop in after a class or before dinner.
From now until Oct. 28 you have the chance to experience a contemplative exhibit all the way from California.
Two artists, Joseph Biel and Richard Kraft, have come to the University to share their "New Work" with its students.The show contains grids and paintings. Three of the grids consist of 12 photographs arranged in four columns of three. The photographs are of everything from a box of matches, to mountains, to ambulances, to pictures of paintings. Another two grids, also composed of twelve parts each, are words painted on canvas - phrases like "Vinegar hill." The exhibit has around seven paintings. They all have a bold color background, a black, silhouetted head in the center and some sort of expression or action around the head. They are very simple, and at the same time quite complex.
"Unlike many of our previous shows, this show is not one piece. It is a series of separate pieces," said Biel as he stood in front of a crowd of 30 wearing a half pinstripe, half brown tweed suit at the opening of the exhibition last Friday at the Fayerweather. Kraft sat beside him on the floor wearing the other half of both suits.
Biel and Kraft have worked together since 1994 when they met as graduate students at the University of Michigan. Biel was a painter and Kraft a photographer. Since collaborating, the two roles have merged. Each piece is a product of an entirely joint effort. After they preformed a John Cage piece entitled "Forty-five Minutes for a Speaker" in the Fayerweather Gallery, they discussed their work with the small audience.
The pieces are meant to, "use images that are open to interpretation and have many layers," Kraft said. The grids, which were the main focus of discussion, are meant to feel like a complex path of thought. They took months of arranging and rearranging until the two artists were satisfied with their layout.
A person should be able to look at them and create a path from one picture to the next and then look again and find a completely different correlation. "We are making pieces that have multiple things going on at once," said Kraft.
The pictures in the grids follow the idea that, "you can frame something that might seem chaotic, and by framing it, it becomes something to look at," said Biel.
To Kraft, photography is, "collecting pieces of the world." The grids are an arrangement of these collected pieces, laid out in an order that suggests that everything can happen at once. The two artists are influenced by John Cage's work, which largely is based on the idea of spontaneity.
But as Kraft said, "We tried to do spontaneous grids, we just couldn't." When they aimed for a random product they would find patterns in their work. Indeed, the grids, at first glance, seem like unrelated snapshots. After a few minutes of contemplation, patterns show through - one thing looks like another, a line is drawn and a path begins.
This art begs for reflection. A simple once-over is overwhelming, nothing makes since; it's chaos. But soon, with a little contemplation, out of chaos rises a peace of understanding - a feeling of accomplished connections.
There's a bumper sticker that says, "Art is life." So, if a little thought can bring understanding to a chaotic bit of art, then a little art can bring peace to a chaotic life. And with your workload, you could use an hour at the Fayerweather.
"New Work" is on display at the Fayerweather Gallery until Oct. 28. The Gallery is open from 9-5 Monday through Friday.
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