The Denisonian

Issue date: 1/26/10 Section: Arts & Entertainment

Media Credit: Meghan Swisher Senior Aleksandra Panovska designs her own dollar bill.

Media Credit: Meghan Swisher Visitors at the Denison Museum take in the unique artwork featured in the two newest exhibits, Reimagining the Distaff Toolkit and Close Encounters: Acts of Social Imagination.

Before I went to the exhibition opening of Reimagining the Distaff Toolkit and Close Encounters 2: Acts of Social Imagination (open until March 22), Megan Hancock, the administrative secretary of the Denison Museum, was kind enough to give me a tour as all of the workers were finishing the installation of the exhibit. Hancock said that she felt "Denison is lucky to have such a showing of talented contemporary artists." Close Encounters: Acts of Social Imagination was originally showed at Provision Library in New York. It explores the ways in which the world and the media affects artists' work, as well as the way in which artists as activists strive to have audiences interpret work.

Reimagining the Distaff Toolkit has a more focused body of work, which employs tools used for women's domestic labor in the artwork. Many of these pieces are more sensory than those of Close Encounters and invite viewers to touch, smell and see parts of the work.

As I perused the gallery at the opening, a few works stood out to me. The first of these was a series by Paul Miller, better known to the art world as the "DJ Spooky" who formed the Soundlab collective. DJ Spooky has an interesting background as he started not as a visual artist, but as a writer of science fiction. Spooky's piece, Manifesto For a People's Republic of Antarctica addresses how the Antarctic is currently not annexed by any country and devoid of laws and ownership. However, many groups use the continent for exploration or natural resources. Spooky's piece employs variations of white, black and blues, which include symbols of a bull's-eye, star, penguins and a plane with text to convey his message and mimic the Antartic landscape. There is also a film that enables viewers to take a closer look at the struggles associated with the Antartic.

The work of Jenny Holzer, another well known contemporary artist, is also featured in the exhibit. She projects words onto buildings, and then makes posters from photograpahs of her projections. Her black and white pigment print in the gallery reads, "Commit to make you destroy me? I will never cease embracing you." By projecting these sorts of words on to the buildings, Holzer is projecting a view on them and the people inside.

My favorite piece was Ester Paregàs' Polyluminous tetraflacidontics (red, yellow, orange), a piece of enamel on Mylar. Paregàs comments on the tensions around consumption and excess. He seems to ask the question, 'do we really know what we're eating'? The piece is reflective and vibrant; the nutrition facts it displays seem to bubble and boil inside the jagged edges of the Mylar, making onlookers conscious of how sugar and other chemicals bubble in our bodies when being processed.

Other pieces are less light-hearted, like Daniel Heyman's Istanbul Series. A drypoint with chine colle series, Istanbul Series speaks of tales from the War on Iraq's prisoners of abuse and torture, but of innocents at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. One portrait tells a tale of an offer of payment for sex by a guard, another tells of the bloody pictures one prisoner showed Heyman on the yellow ochre tint of the work's paper.

Reimagining the Distaff includes pieces full of dark humor: Mildred Johnson's Shredded Joy is the cookbook, The Joy of Cooking, being shreded through a cheese grater. Tom Cohen's Battle Ax is a digital print of a male cartoon in pain being hit by a rolling pin, with a comic below this print explaining the scene; Laura Span's Doilies series (Herpes, HIV, Hepadna, Influenza) is a set of four doilies embroidered in shapes of the viruses. Marie Watt's blanket pieces is serious yet playful unpon first glance. Her Blanket Column is a towering stack full of blankets that tell their story through the tags that are attached to them.

All in all, the show is one well worth seeing. With so many talented contemporary artists showing right here at Denison's Museum, why go off campus to a gallery?

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