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Faculty Art Exhibit:
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Exhibit runs through Feb 16
In Liberal Arts Building and Hemingway Center
Gallery hours: M-F 10-5; Sat 12-5
This exhibition includes mixed media, photography, oil and watercolor paintings, wood sculpture, lithographs, paper, graphic design, and bronze, providing students the opportunity to study a wide array of artistic interests.
One that caught my attention was Assistant Professor of Painting Karen Kosasa, who grew up in Honolulu, Hawaii. Third generation Japanese-American, Kosasa was considered non-native by the indigenous Hawaiians. The Hawaiian kingdom was overthrown by military and business interests and became a state in 1893. It is this experience of being the “other,” of owning land that had been wrongfully taken from other people, that influences Kosasa’s current body of work called “(Settler) Colonial Series.”
In a presentation on Feb. 1, Kosasa explained that most people think of colonialism as bureaucrats and military moving into a country and claiming political power. The other, arguably more insidious form is settler colonialism, which dispossesses indigenous peoples.
One installation piece, “Lessons in Ownership” graces the current BSU Faculty Exhibition. A white wall, approximately 8 feet by 10 feet, holds evenly spaced, slightly smudged blue lines of carpenter’s tape descending from nails. Near the center of the wall, another set of more closely-set lines form a box. Inside that box is another nearly solid blue box, with the word “mine” appearing three times. Below the box, a dresser drawer juts out from the wall. The drawer is evenly divided in thirds, containing deceivingly innocent items: silk houses that look like pin cushions, small white fences, and miniature trees.
The snap lines are lines of intention, lines of ownership, while the color blue presents a false sense of the pristine. The piece, is about “how we’re taught to own things,” and how in the process, those harbingers of culture – artists, writers, poets – played into it by educating people, seducing them really, into believing that “that land could belong to them.” Ever seen the posters encouraging settlers on the east coast to move west? And it’s not just Hawaii. For hundreds of years, the U.S. has deprived the Indian nations, claiming their land and destroying their livelihood.
Kosasa explained the trees and much of the meaning of the piece when she noted, “I spent a lot of money on these trees, and here I was destroying them by dumping chalk on them.” Settlers build houses, thereby claiming land; they build fences around it, claiming more, and they claim the landscape, laying ownership upon the very vegetation. Her reluctance to destroy something she had purchased reinforces the possessiveness and ownership her piece represents.
On the opposite end of the exhibit was the work of Illustration Professor William Carman. Two out of three of his pieces were commissioned. Commissions are in many ways the bread and butter of illustration. “Every artist wants to sell their work,” said Carman. Commission pieces are a certain way to do that. The bad thing about them is that “someone else has the final say.”
The images in “Order in the Chaos,” a CD cover for singer Julia Davis Allen, are heavily influenced by the lyrics and music on the CD itself. Carman digitally scanned some images and drew others in pen-and-ink. His pieces work with muted colors in a startling way: two heavily brown, one a lighter pink, but the works contain somewhere a brilliant deep color. In “Order in the Chaos,” it’s a small beetle in the center. In “Distilling Creativity,” the drops from the funnel are blue, red, and green, respectively. In “Amazing Guillotine,” the wizard’s eyes glow a deep and eerie red. And, Carman admits, the commissioned pieces are easier to define meaning from, while “Amazing Guillotine,” is open to both his and others’ interpretation.
Misty Schymtzik