Students in the semester's Sculpture I class dug deep to transform the Coleman Burke Gallery in Fort Andross. The space serves as an excavation site for the final class project of the semester which culminates in the show?titled "Quarry" that open? tonight.
"The show is an investigation into pattern and what patterns we respond to and what that may mean about ourselves," said adjunct lecturer Wade Kavanaugh '01, who taught the sculpture class this semester.
The gallery will include a collaborative work by the class as well as individual pieces. The collaborative piece covers two walls as well as a row of columns that bisects the room. It involves rubbings of different textures and patterns that students collected in sketchbooks throughout the semester.
"We're all using the same color paper and black crayons, but they're all different patterns. It looks like a giant cross section of a whole bunch of sedimentary layers," said Chris Bird '07.
"It's a wall piece that establishes a pseudo fossil record," added Kavanaugh.
In addition, the show includes individual pieces by each of the 17 members of the class.
"We each have one individual piece that started as a four-and-a-half square foot print on the floor and grew to different heights," said Bird.
A number of pieces in the show are sculptural objects made out of throw- away or disposable items.
"They selected those materials by themselves after a number of experimentations with different materials," said Kavanaugh. "The only parameter was that the piece had to be a cube, although not all of them are."
One of the over-arching themes of the show is the concept of using the architecture of the room as sculpture.
"We tried to turn the architecture of the room into a sort of sculpture," said Bird.
"Sculpture and architecture overlap in that there is a sense of time involved in experiencing both," said Kavanaugh. "It's a physical space that you experience instead of an illusionary space.
The Coleman Burke Gallery provides artists with a particularly unique space to display art.
"It's one of the best spaces in Maine to show artwork," said Kavanaugh. "It's large and relatively open and unobstructed. It has a pristine floor and direct light."
"The opportunity to use the gallery shaped the class a lot. It's a fantastic opportunity for the students," he added.
The Coleman Burke Gallery, named for the owner of Fort Andross, was founded by Bowdoin sculpture professor and artist John Bisbee who co-directs the gallery.
"The mission of the gallery is to serve as a venue for large-scale, site-specific works of art that respond to the unique characteristics of the space," wrote Professor of Art Mark Wethli, who co-directs the Coleman Burke Gallery, in an e-mail.
The first show in the gallery was a joint exhibition of student works in the fall of 2006. Since then, the gallery has featured shows by Professor Michael Kolster, Kavanaugh, Ben Butler '00, and Wethli.
"Although the first year of exhibitions has been by artists with a connection to Bowdoin, future shows will feature artists from across the country and around the world," wrote Wethli.
In addition to "Quarry," two of Kavanaugh's students, Ben Sandell and Andrea Aduna, will premier their independent projects in the downstairs sculpture studio beneath Frontier Café. Their show is called "Wood," and will showcase Sandell and Aduna's experimentations with wood as a medium for sculpture.
The opening of both shows is tonight from 5-8 p.m. in Fort Andross.