- Title: Art Exhibition - 'In-Running, Out-Flowing Web,' mixed-media installation
- Host Department:
Institute for the Humanities
- Date: 02/29/2004 - 02/29/2004
- Time: 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM
- Location: Osterman Common Room, 0520 Rackham Building, 915 E. Washington, Ann Arbor
- Contact Information: Nicola Kiver
734 936 3518
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- Description: Jim Cogswell, Art + Design
- Detailed Information: Showing March 1 - 26, 2004
Gallery Hours: Weekdays 9 - 5 pm, closed Tuesdays 12 - 2 pm, closed Wednesdays 10 am - 1 pm.
I make things because I need to. What happens takes over. The objects in this exhibit were enlarged by responses from other makers, in movement, word and sound, generously offered, and still radiating.
The objects are constructed of fabric stretched across armatures of twisted wire grids, Rust stains the fabric in shades of brown and orange lines visible as a faceted drawing on the surface. Beeswax fused over the fabric has hardened into a shell through which lines are visible at various depths. The taut, semi-translucent surfaces have the sensual attraction of human skin.
The underlying web of wires, the suggestion of skin as membrane, as sack, as the body's largest and most visible organ, also evoke the constructions of other creatures within our environment. Exoskeletons, cocoons, and hives are visible evidence of natural geometry, a mutely eloquent intelligence within life itself.
I wonder at the arbitrary boundary drawn between such instinctual building activities and what we more comfortably label artistic creation. At the very least, these objecs provide metaphors for processes of creative intention, the web of imagination evoked by poet Richard Tillinghast's interlocking mesh of paths in 'The Ariel Web', traversed also by composer Andrew Mead's musical structure and dancer Peter Sparling's body movement, translated into morphing grid by the brainmapping algorithms of biostatistician Fred Bookstein.
When making takes over, it changes us.
Jim Cogswell
