Altered States: Bell Gallery Exhibition is off the Wall, in the Stairwell, and on the Lawn

by Deborah Baum

List Art Center has undergone a transformation.

Ten established and emerging artists, including three Brown alumnae, are presenting installations throughout the building as part of the David Winton Bell Gallery and the Department of Visual Art's collaborative exhibition, in TRANSIT: from OBJECT to SITE. With diverse multimedia and site-based projects engaging the building's stairwell and hallways, galleries and grounds, List appears entirely different inside and out.

Department of Visual Art Chair Leslie Bostrom first conceived of this exhibition last year, along with Marlene Malik, who retired this year after more than 25 years of teaching sculpture at Brown.

"We thought it may be a good time to look at installation as a sculptural genre and think about how it fits in to the overall rubric of sculpture," Malik said. "Hopefully, the exhibition questions installation, what its value is in the world, and explores where it's going."

Rather than attempting to provide an overview of installation art, Vesela Sretenovic, curator of the Bell Gallery, said in TRANSIT illustrates some of the many practices that fall under its umbrella. In conjunction with the exhibition, the Bell Gallery is organizing a symposium to "provide both a historical context and a platform for critical examination of installation art," said Sretenovic.

She explained that the exhibition's title, in TRANSIT: from OBJECT to SITE, addresses a significant transition in contemporary art, from simply "viewing a painting or sculpture, to physically entering and participating in the work."

At List, one can't help but participate in these works.

Upon exiting the second-floor elevator, one is unsuspectingly drawn into Magaly Ponce's Subject, Horizon, Reflection, (left) which spans the entire second-floor hallway. Using six video projectors, two live cameras, and several DVD players, Ponce captures a subject's image and merges it with video of vast landscapes, "playing with time, thresholds, and shadows." Because the video is slightly delayed, subjects are able to catch a short glimpse of their image while entering the hallway.

"It's not only about the physical reflection, but also self-reflection," described Ponce, a Chilean-born artist currently living in Providence. "When you see yourself in the video, it becomes a mirror of who you are. It reflects back an aspect of your personality that you didn't really know about, so you can see yourself in different angles."

Other installations include Laura Evans' Sinuendo, which takes over the north stairwell, consisting of "a large mass of curling yellow forms clutched together and suspended from the ceiling" and Xavier Veilhan's Mobile, comprised of fifty spheres in varying sizes suspended from the ceiling of the lobby. Sharon Louden's flickering Faires is situated on the lawn, while renowned artist Fred Wilson presents his work in the Bell Gallery, and Peggy Diggs' installation is displayed in the second-floor gallery. In addition, subRosa, a feminist art collective, created an interactive performance piece on the terrace.

Presenting work alongside these prominent artists are three women from the Class of '06, Arlene Chung, Hilary Leewong, and Nico Wheadon, whose projects were sponsored in part by the Creative Arts Council.

Chung, now a medical student at New York University, says her installation, Untitled (The Legacy of Gaetan Dugas), was driven by her interest in medicine. (Gaetan Dugas is the "mythical patient zero" who brought AIDS to the United States.) Chung's work consists of hundreds of syringes with needles suspended from the interior lobby and black numbers painted on the wall representing AIDS statistics.

"When people see numbers, there's a sense of detachment. People think, 'oh this can't happen to me,'" she explained. "But I want people to look up at the syringes and feel as vulnerable as the next person, and think, 'this is something I should be scared about.'"

Wheadon's interactive installation Soft Mathematics: Numbers Revisited is comprised of sound objects and text taken from the artist's own fictional writings inspired by the Dewey Decimal System. Situated on the north lawn is Leewong's Pasa, exploring themes of "nation, identity, and security."

"I wanted it to be outside so that people stumble upon it, rather than entering a gallery or 'art space,'" she said. "To me, installation is a type of sensory experience, that is relative to space, location, and the moment."

List will stay in this altered state until October 22.