Layers Upon Layers: Paper and Image

This week’s art show in Hartell Gallery is no easy view — there’s a lot to see and dissect, from works on paper to sculpture and even sculptural works on paper. The viewer simply can’t absorb the entire installation in one turn around the room. Elliot Hess grad’s M.F.A. thesis show is challenging but not inaccessible; the conscientious viewer will not walk away empty-handed.

Worth His Weight In Plaster

The fulcrum is a handshake. It’s an exchange of power, a link between bodies, the passing of traditions and a tight squeeze for love.
“It all rests in the hands,” Noah Robbins ’10 said about the two statues he has constructed for his untitled exhibit that explores these themes and is currently open in Tjaden gallery.
Two heavy, white-plaster casts of individual male torsos perch atop wood crate-like pedestals. The two bodies unite by extended arms — they hold hands out between the two wooden columns on which they rest. One body is from a smaller man, presumably a younger man, and both bodies seem immensely unyielding and weighty. The two arms that extend over the gap between the pedestals seem uncommonly fragile.

Student Artist Spotlight: Constanza Ontaneda '09

As her fellow seniors scramble to secure jobs in an ever-dwindling economy, Fiber Science and Apparel Design major Constanza Ontaneda ’09 is forging her own path. A designer who grew up in places as divergent as Romania and Brazil, she’s already started her own international business, Bernales & Goretti, which imports fair-wage clothing made in Peru to be sold in the United States. The Sun sat down with Ontaneda in Risley Hall to discuss her passion for fashion, how she hopes to change Peru and her plans after school.
The Sun: How did you get started in design?

Building and Designing Intimacy

Two fifth-year architects have teamed up to display their very different artworks in Sibley’s Hartell gallery. Both artists explore the way their objects interact with the viewer’s body: physically and culturally provoking the viewer to imagine the contours of what one chooses to embrace and what one chooses to give up. Like the image of Rubin’s face/vase (replaced by the artists’ profiles), which they display on their lone curatorial placard, absence always hugs and contains the material as its unacknowledged background.