Blending historical text and tags from clothing, the artist behind the newest temporary exhibit at the James R. Reynolds Student Art Gallery seeks to give insight into America’s past.
The exhibit opened Wednesday and features Texas Tech Professor Carol Fluekiger.
Student members of the MSC Visual Arts committee, which stocks the gallery, were drawn to Fluekiger’s pieces in part because of her work with cyanotypes, a type of photographic printing that yields a blue-print-type image produced through exposure to ultraviolet radiation.
“I embed these cyanotypes into the paint, rather than digitize these images into a piece,” Fluekiger said.
Michelle Griffith, marketing junior and committee marketing executive, said the medium and historical context in Fluekiger’s works provides a unique insight into America’s past.
“The artwork itself is made so that parts of it are printed from the Library of Congress and The Women’s Bible,” Griffith said.
Featured in the gallery are pieces from two main bodies of work. The first includes cyanotypes of handwritten documents from the early American civil rights movement.
Fluekiger said she was inspired to create this body of work after an artwork assignment centered around the topic of women’s studies.
“I normally did botanical artwork, however I accepted the assignment, learned how to work with the technology, and used a cyanotype of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s handwritten ‘Solitude of Self’ speech,” Fluekiger said.
“Spin Cycles,” Fluekiger’s second body of work, integrates cyanotypes of tag labels from articles of the artist’s clothing.
Fluekiger said “Spin Cycles” was meant to represent the war on terror and the discussion following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
“I was listening to NPR and they said that the only way to really stop the war on terror and deal with this was to understand geography — that not many people understand geography here,” Fluekiger said. “I was folding laundry when I noticed all of the different countries that were on these tags of my clothes and I thought, ‘If I were to have to point out this country on a map, I couldn’t do it.’ So this is really about travelling the globe at the speed of a spin cycle.”
Griffith commented on the duality between the complexity and simplicity of the “Spin Cycle” works.
“To me it’s really neat because it has a lot of complex details going on in one piece and it has the same muted tone,” Griffith said. “It just reminds of earth and life.”
A celebration of the opening of the exhibition will take place at 6:30 p.m. Thursday in the Reynolds Gallery.