New exhibit at Samek—‘Misleading Trails’
By Lily Beauvilliers
Arts & Entertainment Editor
Located on the fourth floor of the Elaine Langone Center, the Edward and Marthann Samek Art Gallery suffers from an “out of sight, out of mind” mentality—students do not hear about fascinating exhibits located right above their heads while dining at the Bostwick Cafeteria.
The best way to remedy this ignorance? Visit the gallery before Nov. 19. The rewarding exhibit entitled “Misleading Trails” awaits you.
The “Misleading Trails” opening-night lecture was given yesterday. Another talk by exhibit artist Vernon Fisher, a professor at the University of Northern Texas, will occur at 5 p.m. on Nov. 7.
In addition to the exhibit, the Project Room will host an installation by Elizabeth King entitled “Impossible to Freeze the Moment of Regard.” Stop-frame films and the objects used in them, including a humanoid sculpture called “Pupil,” will be on display.
To any student who wants to break out of the Bucknell bubble: this exhibit is for you.
“Bucknell students will be able to view artists from far away, some prominent artists of our time,” said Dan Mills, director of the Samek Art Gallery and one of the artists on display. “Part of Samek’s mission is to create programming that brings the world to Bucknell and looks at international trends.”
The exhibit certainly achieves its goal. Artists Enrique Chagoya, Xiaoze Xie, Hai Bo, Hong Hao, Ai WeiWei, Vernon Fisher and Dan Mills offer a synthesis of art based out of the United States and Beijing, China.
Mills and Xie, associate professor of art, formed the exhibit.
“They created the show as an off-shoot of another show that happened here and in China a few years ago,” Nancy Cleaver, a Samek staff member, said.
That show, entitled “Regeneration: Contemporary Chinese Art from China and the U.S.,” closes in Virginia next month after touring eight venues in China and the United States.
Xie described the birth of “Misleading Trails” in the exhibit catalogue.
“Dan Mills and I were talking. … Our discussion turned to the artists in the show and we soon discovered that there was no lack of paralleling or interconnected concepts between Chinese and American contemporary art,” Xie said. “We then came up with the idea to organize an international traveling exhibition to develop communications and exchange among artists from both countries.”
The pieces in the exhibit cannot be categorized under one heading. Each artist uses multiple genres such as photography, painting and sculpture to explore a variety of different themes, including communication, colonialism and war. The exhibit is grouped so pieces containing similar themes will be near each other, spatially connecting the works of different artists.
“The pieces are often conceptually related but physically different,” Mills said.
Several of the works explore how we understand our world. Xie’s photo-realistic paintings of stacks of newspapers such as “Chinese Library No. 28” look at the overwhelming abundance of information available in print.
Fisher’s painting “End” elaborates on the same theme, but deals with the meaning of symbols such as words and images by juxtaposing an altered dictionary page, an image of a beach sunset and a cartoon.
“Vernon Fisher subverts images and languages that appear articulate at first, but actually become difficult to comprehend,” Mills said.
“End” was acquired for the University by the Samek Art Gallery for possible display in the Ellen Clarke Bertrand Library.
Artists in “Misleading Trails” explore the way humans organize the world around them. In two striking pieces, “My Things No. 7” and “My Things No. 8,” Hao scanned common items from his daily life (book-binding in the former and objects from his pockets in the latter) and arranged them compactly on large canvases exactly to scale.
The resulting aesthetic clutter looks like a harrowing “I Spy”-style tableau, but without anything particular to search for; the viewer notices only the arrangement of objects.
Of particular relevance to modern society are the pieces dealing with concepts of war and imperialism. Mills’s piece “His World View,” created in 2004, depicts a projection of the world in which the United States has been greatly exaggerated. Every other country has been shrunk to the periphery and covered with targets.
Chagoya does the same in paintings like “Road Map I (World),” in which a huge United States is pictured harboring a tank topped with an image of Jesus.
Mills encourages students, staff and members of the community to come to the exhibit.
“We are art advocates,” Mills said.
“We are trying to further the arts as an integral part of life.”
Groups are invited to visit the gallery, hold meetings there or otherwise request to use it as a setting.
The gallery is open 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday to Wednesday and Friday, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursday and 1-5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Additional appointments are available by calling (570) 577-3792.
Admission to the gallery is free, so escape the bubble and see “Misleading Trails” as soon as you can.
