The Faulconer Gallery opens today with new exhibits from artists Greg Smith, a Guggenheim Fellow, and Jill Schrift, Art.
Smith’s exhibit, entitled “Quality Uncertainty: The Market for Lemons,” features two separate installations. “Breakdown Lane” makes its debut in Faulconer and expresses similar themes as the second installation, “Looped.”
Smith developed the proposal for “Breakdown Lane” for the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, which allowed him to take the year off from his job as a full-time high school science teacher at a private school in New York.
His work combines brightly colored canvas rolls, lawn chairs, paper and car parts in order to contextualize video shorts. For Smith, the choice of materials often informs his work. “A lot of times, I’ll start out with some choices about materials and a basic idea about what I’m getting at,” Smith said. “That will start me off in some ways.”
Smith draws inspiration from his own experience. In his late 20s he switched from a career in physics to one in art.
“I have a Ph.D. in physics, and I didn’t like it, so I left it and switched to art,” Smith said. “So that kind of informs a lot of what I do.”
In both “Breakdown Lane” and “Looped,” the characters grapple with situations in what end up being risky ways.
“Both the projects started with cars,” Smith said. “Usually a road movie leads to a point of failure. Some comeuppance [occurs] and the movie ends. [‘Breakdown Lane’] starts at the point of failure, already in the breakdown lane, and you’re not getting anywhere.”
Daniel Strong, Associate Director of the Art Gallery, was excited to have the opportunity to bring an artist to campus to create an exhibit.
“We do a lot of exhibitions where art arrives at the loading dock and we unpack it and we hang it and that’s an exhibition,” Strong said. “It’s fun to do things with artists where they come here and just transform the space.”
Strong and Smith also noted that the Faulconer Gallery is an unusually large space for temporary exhibits.
“We’re lucky that we have this much space for temporary exhibitions, but it often means that one artist can’t possibly use the whole thing, so we break it up,” Strong said.
In this case, the Gallery paired Smith’s exhibit with “Works in Clay,” an exhibit by Schrift.
Schrift’s exhibit includes approximately 100 ceramic pieces.
“I am committed to bringing beauty into the world of the everyday,” Schrift said in her artist’s statement. As a result of this focus, Schrift’s pieces all serve a functional purpose as well as an artistic one.
She uses a variety of techniques to give her pieces interesting features. For example, the exhibit includes a series of vases made by brushing sodium silicate on the outside of the piece, heating the clay and then continuing to work the piece from the inside, pushing out until the sodium silicate coating cracks.
“I love that traditional vase form, and many, many cultures do that form,” Schrift said. “It pays homage to the spinning pots of the past.”
Schrift’s experimentation has resulted in ceramics that beautifully achieve her goal to combine art and function. She will be demonstrating the sodium silicate process during the Faulconer Gallery Community Day on Saturday, Feb. 1.
Smith and Schrift’s exhibits open today, with a reception from 4:15 to 6 p.m, and will remain in the Gallery until Sunday, March 16. Smith will be returning to campus for a Gallery Talk on “Breakdown Lane” on Feb. 25.
