12 | ARTS & LEISURE T h e P h i l l i p i a n September 28, 2012

By Jenna Shin // Photos by Sarah Lee

Art 500 InstallationsIn the Sanctuary

Virginia Fu ’13 Vernoica Harrington ’13 Sierra Jamir ’14

Katie Chapman ’14

Bo Yoon ’13

Rachel Andresen ’13

Didi Oyinlola ’13

Sarah Lee ’13 Molly Magnell ’14

Throughout the past week, runners and walkers in the Moncrieff Cochran Sanc-tuary by the Nathan Hale Dormitory in Pine Knoll may have stumbled upon the cre-ative art installed in a clear-ing.

Students in the Art 500 Advanced Studio Art class finished putting up their in-stallations last Sunday and the projects were on display this week.

Using natural and man-made materials and objects, Art 500 students created temporary installation proj-ects that reflected each art-ist’s perception of the area chosen in a designated clear-ing of the Sanctuary.

“I found that the main objective of installation art is to change the space you’re working with in some way and especially change how the viewer sees that space and sees your piece in that space,” said Veronica Har-rington ’13, one of the artists.

Art 500 Installations ranged from a multitude of umbrellas hanging from the branches of the trees to drawings of facial expres-sions embedded in the soil.

The students had 11 days to finish the entire project, a relatively short span of time considering the large space each artist had to work with.

“[The greatest difficulty was] definitely time man-agement, since we had less than a week to get the proj-ect done [after coming up with a proposal]…but it was a nice experience overall,” said Molly Magnell ’14, another artist in Art 500.

Through the process of putting up installations in the Sanctuary, the Art 500 students gained the new ex-

perience of working with a large scale environment.

“I enjoyed having the opportunity to install [the project] because you normal-ly don’t get to work with a setting like the Sanctuary. It was really nice to just think about the environment and make my installation fit the nature,” said Sarah Lee ’13.

According to Therese Zemlin, Instructor in Art and of the course, there will be a brief reception for the Art 500 Installations this Sunday afternoon in the Sanctuary.

Rachel Andresen ’13Andresen’s project fea-

tures a winding trail of snip-pets of different kinds of media, including magazines, cartoons and memos from both personal archives and scraps available in the art classroom.

A wide array of miscel-laneous objects is gathered together in a colorful assort-ment attached onto a long piece of fabric that twists up and around the bark of the trees and forms a pathway on the ground.

“My project was meant to convey nostalgia through a path of memories. It was col-laged with my mementos and old magazines and books that I found in the art classroom, so it was kind of the juxta-position of different genera-tions,” Andresen wrote in an e-mail to The Phillipian.

Andresen’s installation mixes trees with man-made papers and materials.

“I wanted it to be univer-sal, so that anyone of any age could look at it and see [his or her] past but [that the space] still maintain some of the personal significance to me,” she said.

“I wanted to echo the idea of the bleeding tree and heal-ing it, so I started off by wrap-ping red fabric onto the tree trunks with bandages on top of it,” said Lee.

The red pieces of fab-ric and yarn that are tied to the top branches hang loose onto the ground and mimic the flow of the blood, and the clumps of the red yarn that are spread out on the ground represent the concept of clot-ting blood.

“I wanted to connect my installation with the nature, so I ended up having red yarn spread on the bottom of the trunk, imitating the im-age of arteries and veins and the blood flowing. I also had red yarn and fabric hanging on the branches to create a clearer connection between the environment and my in-stallation,” said Lee.

Molly Magnell ’14Using wire, Magnell cre-

ated nests of metal cocoons that hang from a group of trees, a subtle installation that smoothly blends into the nature.

With inspiration from her favorite genres of media, Magnell’s project aimed to express the very natural ele-ment of the wild through the use of man-made material.

“I had these giant metal cocoons inspired by sci-fi and fantasy…I kind of wanted to mix industrial with nature. I used chicken wire to comple-ment the work,” said Magnell.

The cocoons, hanging from the tree branches, are intricately crafted from wire and the repeated pattern of the metal mesh that reflects sunlight and highlights the cocoon’s subtle presence.

“I just wished that the project had showed up a little more because the wire was thinner than I thought, so the cocoons get a little lost in the trees, but it’s kind of cool that they’re hidden too,” she said.

Didi Oyinlola ’13Creating a little house in

the middle of the Sanctuary, Oyinlola creates a cozy feel-ing through the tiny house she has built among the woods.

A small group of pine

cones encased in transparent plexiglass panels make up the house that is perched on top of a fallen tree trunk.

The broken branches that protrude from the tree trunk on which the miniature house is set up creates the image of a tree-lined street in front of the house.

A bright yellow sheet drapes over the rest of the tree’s trunk in front of the mini doorway of the plexiglas house.

“I had a good time making it, because in all of my four years here, I’ve never really spent much time in the Sanc-tuary. Making a piece of art to go in there kind of gave me a new appreciation for one of the quieter and [more] peace-ful parts of campus,” said Oyinlola of her experience with the Installation Project in an e-mail to The Phillipian.

Bo Yoon ’13In a patch of clear ground,

two human forms, one made up of colorful jelly beans and the other made up of stones, surprise those who venture into the Sanctuary.

“My art installation de-picts the ambivalence of the human mind. Many humans are actually destroying nature for convenient life to build buildings, roads, etc. Jelly beans are artificial and hu-man-made and make a stark contrast to nature,” Yoon wrote in an e-mail to The Phillipian.

One of the figures is elon-gated, representing a mature man, while the other figure with a much smaller stature depicts the image of a baby.

The jelly beans used to make the man figure high-light his impurity and con-trast the purity of the baby figure, which is made with natural stones. This contrast allows viewers to consider humans’ detrimental rela-tionship with nature.

“The most difficult part during this installation was to get rid of insects that came to eat jellybeans on the ground. But I believed that it would be great to see my installation mingled with the nature, even including insects,” wrote Yoon.

Katie Chapman ’14Chapman’s installation

includes a variety of facial ex-pressions drawn in ink and wa-tercolor which are embedded in the soft soil of the Sanctuary.

The emotions depicted range from horror to astonish-ment. Chapman placed partic-ular emphasis on the eyes of her subjects in order to convey the intensity of these emotions.

The main objective of Chapman’s piece was to incor-porate human parts into the natural setting of the Sanctu-ary.

“My project was to take two conflicting ideas and rep-resent them both into my proj-ect. I drew these ink faces and buried them in the ground, and it’s mainly taking man-made objects into nature,” said Chap-man.

Virginia Fu ’13A mass of pages ripped out

of books hangs on a clothesline throughout the trees of the Sanctuary and make up Fu’s personal and thoughtful proj-ect.

The pages, with varying shades of faded white, tell dif-ferent stories that loosely con-nect to each other, as they are from a personal collection of books enjoyed by Fu.

This idea of a book clothes-line was unplanned for, and Fu thought of the concept while she was reading.

“I had this book I didn’t like, so I ripped it up, and then Ms. Zemlin gave me the string and these clothespins and put them [the pages] on the string and clothespins. And then I was like ‘why am I hanging up a book I didn’t like?’ so then I went through all my favorite books and ripped out my favor-ite pages and hung them up,” said Fu.

“I’m afraid they [the pag-es] are going to blow away, but that’s okay. [They’re] like Ti-betan prayer flags—that’s the point because they’re carried by the wind,” she said.

Veronica Harrington ’13Nestled among the branch-

es of the trees, Harrington’s project features a sizable spider web made out of bike chains that are fastened with wire.

“People think spider webs are annoying and often times bat them away, and the metallic nature of this web makes that impossible, so I meant to met-aphorically show that we are

so dependent on technology,” Harrington said in an e-mail to The Phillipian.

The significant influence technology has in the world today was Harrington’s main focus of the project. The fact that the spider web is actually a metaphor for the computer “web” was an interesting par-allel Harrington created.

“I don’t think we can bat away the technological web—we are too addicted, and I thought people should see how trapped we are by superfluous things we’re now dependent on. Only afterward did I realize the pun that this is a web and [that] I am shedding a light on how we’re trapped in the world wide web,” said Harrington.

Sierra Jamir ’14Umbrellas of varying de-

signs and colors hang loosely from the branches of the trees by the entrance of the clearing in the Sanctuary.

The brightly colored um-brellas set a direct contrast with the nature and stand out among the uniform colors of green and brown of the back-ground.

“I was thinking about the use of man-made objects as a substitute for natural things. I thought about how umbrellas can act as our own personal canopies in a more modern sense,” said Jamir.

The umbrellas are placed upwards, some hanging at the top of the tree while others hang within reach.

Of her process of putting the umbrellas up, Jamir said, “I had to find a way to put these umbrellas in the sky. I attached the umbrella to a string and a stick and threw the stick over a branch. It took a while, but it was fun.”

Sarah Lee ’13A certain tree that appears

lifeless is covered in bright red yarns and fabrics that wrap around the trunk and hang from the branches, setting a stark contrast from the rest of the woods.

Lee said that people nowa-days often neglect nature, trees in particular, constructing buildings and other facilities without considering the envi-ronment. Through her instal-lation, she tried to depict the wounded nature and the need to heal it as expressed through stretch bandages wrapped on top of the clump of red fabrics on the tree trunk.