Exhibit features forms and textures of contemporary experience
Take a minute out from your busy schedule and walk over to the First National Bank Gallery in the Morgan Library (just east of the main entrance, near interlibrary loan). You will find the latest installment of the collaborative art venture, Accidental Vestments.
The show will run through June 12.
On Thursday, May 11, from 4-6 p.m., there will be an opening reception for the show in the First National Bank Gallery. Light refreshments will be served. A description of the show follows.
Good Obstructions: A Show of Collaborative Art
What is the role of an artist in a democratic society? How can an artist remain true to his or her art while having the greatest possible relevance and audience? And where, in fact, is the artist? In his or her studio, whiling away the hours in isolation, or out on the street engaging in the facts of the day?
The 21st century, with its rapidly changing media and hyper-specialization, presents great challenges to any artist, and indeed any engaged member of society. The members of Accidental Vestments believe art is best served by collective conversation and action. Not only are means, media and outlets of expression multiplied, but so too are voices, resources, languages, resistances. American philosopher John Dewey tells us "The task (of artistic activity) is to restore continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute experience." We live in complicated times; the forms of our experience-refined and raw-are daily reminders of the challenges our world faces.
Good Obstructions is an attempt by Accidental Vestments, the collaborative arts group at Colorado State, to register some of the forms and textures of contemporary experience. Let us consider the possibilities of an engaged art, or what poet Adrienne Rich declares as an "oppositional imagination." What, how, when and why do we resist, do we obstruct? Art is always for something; its utility gains footing in having a "there" to resist.
As you will see, obstruction can take many forms. It might involve limits, constraints, procedures, and so the methods of art. It might articulate frustration, alienation, rupture, play, insurrection, protest and social conscience, and so the content of art. Or it might exhibit surfaces, artifacts, liminal zones, contact areas, and so the material or art. Consider the many possibilities of Good Obstructions. Beauty and utility, we learn to make with others and so produce a more sustainable, resistant world.
Accidental Vestments is an extracurricular collaboration developed between the MFA Program in Creative Writing and the MFA Program in Studio Art at CSU. The collaboration is in its third year. Besides regular group critiques, readings, and discussions, the collaborators organize performances and art exhibits. The exhibition you are hereby invited to is the second in what we hope will be a continuing series.
- Profs. Matthew Cooperman & Marius Lehene, Curators
Matthew Cooperman, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Creative Writing
Department of English
Eddy 327
Colorado State University
Fort Collins, CO 80523-1773
(970) 491-6843
(970) 491-5601 - fax
Category: Events and Coming Attractions
Submitted: Wednesday, May 10, 2006
Subject: Bank One Gallery
Contact: Matthew B Cooperman
E-mail: Matthew.Cooperman@colostate.edu
Phone: (970) 491-6843
