?"New Sculptures" display talent

By Farrah Madanay     11/30/11 6:00pm

The sculptures currently on display in the "New Sculptures" exhibition certainly do not look like work you would expect from beginning sculpture students. The exhibition, showing until Dec. 16 in the Main Gallery of the Rice Media Center, features work completed by ARTS 365: Sculpture I students under the direction of lecturer Natasha Bowdoin. The contemporary sculptures vary in size and media, including wood, metal, plaster and cardboard. Through the class projects "The Giant Head," "The Deconstructed Chair" and "The Body Fragmented," Bowdoin encouraged students to explore the relationship between concept ?and construction.

"Natasha Bowdoin, the class instructor, and Randall McCabe, who runs the wood and metal shop, did an excellent job of curating the show," Elliott SoRelle, a Lovett College senior and director of the student-run Matchbox Gallery in ?Sewall Hall, said.

"The Giant Head" project is represented in the exhibition by three cardboard heads, two on podiums and one slumped on the floor. In contrast to the cardboard giant heads, with their detailed facial features and corrugated cardboard hair, three white plaster sculptures line a wall, forming a series of amorphous busts. Their augmented brow ridges bear semblance to early modern ?Homosapiens.

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Students complicated function in "The Deconstructed Chair" project by disassembling and reassembling chairs into forms different from ?the originals.

 "It enabled students to reconsider a process that is usually perceived as destructive rather as something transformative and productive," SoRelle said of the project.

The highlighted works from this project include both figural and abstract wooden sculptural representations. A dancer balances on one leg in the middle of the exhibition space while chair legs splinter and protrude from an abstract wall piece.

"The Body Fragmented" project explores the element of narrative as depicted in cast body parts. A sculpture of an arm with accompanying photos narrates an actual occurrence in which the artist cooked and ate beef from a plaster cast of his arm. Another sculpture is a verisimilitude of a heart, cast in red wax and pierced by an actual bullet. "I used wax molding to cast an anatomical heart then realistically showed how a bullet would destroy it," Brown College junior Sunil Bellur said.

The "New Sculptures" exhibition successfully showcases the talents of Bowdoin's Sculpture I class, comprised largely of non-visual arts majors.

"It's a really great opportunity to see all the talent of Rice students. A splattering of beauty amidst a campus of intellect," Ruchir Shah, a McMurtry senior who visited ?the exhibition, said.

The exhibition is on view from 11 a.m. until ?4 p.m. every Monday through Friday for the remainder of this semester.

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