The beginning of each semester brings new talents, activities, faces and memories to Lafayette’s campus. This week, the faculty will be sharing some of their own bright ideas and works to their fellow faculty and staff members and students at the Lafayette Studio Faculty Exhibition Opening.
A few contributing artists weighed in on the upcoming event. Professor Karina Skvirsky, associate professor at the Williams Visual Arts Center, is presenting six photographs that she took last year around the Holland Tunnel, a few blocks from her residence.
“As a transit hub for a lot of people, it’s a pretty strange area to hang out in or photograph for that matter,” said Skvirsky.
Like many of the contributing professors, Skvirsky is teaching several courses at Lafayette this semester including Photography and Society, Studio Theory and Practice, American Studies and Photography II. This is the first time in recent years that the Art Department has hosted an exhibition featuring only faculty, so the anticipated turnout is unpredictable. Many of the contributing professors, however, are excited to join the event for the first time. After making the difficult decision on which of her works to feature in the exhibition and choosing a backup project after her original photographs were needed in another exhibition, Skvirsky offered some words of advice for art students just beginning this semester:
“Make art about what interests you,” she said, “but also challenge yourself on what you think those interests might be.”
Greta Brubaker, a visiting part-time instructor, has been teaching at Lafayette since 2007 and will offer Digital Photography this semester.
“The images that I’ve included in the exhibition are from a larger series dealing with lifestyles that exist on the margins of society, specifically the Libertarian movement and Green movement,” said Brubaker. “I use a combination of portraits, landscapes and detail shots to talk about living off the grid, becoming self-sufficient and a return to a more ‘old fashioned’ style of living.”
Brubaker’s contributions to the exhibit were inspired mainly by the work of Alec Sloth and Jess Burke.
“It is hard to represent a large body of work in just a few images so I chose pieces that I thought had strong visual elements.”
Last spring, Brubaker hosted a show at Lafayette that featured black and white landscapes focused on coal mining regions in Pennsylvania. “The work in the show [this year] is really new- some shot within weeks of the exhibit going up so I’m excited to see what the response will be,” said Brubaker.
To prospective art students, Brubaker said, “I would advise any students interested in pursuing art or photography to choose subjects that interest them on a deeply personal level. Work that comes from a place of passion is more successful then that coming from apathy.”
The exhibition features Greta K. Brubaker, Jase Clark, Nestor Armando Gil, Curlee Raven Holton, Ed Kerns, Adam MacHose, Karina Aguilera Skvirsky, and Jim Toia is running until March 1 in the Grossman Gallery of the Williams Visual Arts Building on North Third Street.
