When reading a poem or listening to a piece of classical music, what do you immediately notice? Perhaps, the first things that come to mind are words, phrases, notes, or the melody – probably not silence. Silence’s importance is easily overlooked by virtue of its nature of being the absence of sound. We are much more inclined, in general, to notice the presence of something (sound in this case) rather than the lack of that something, but silence plays an important, if somewhat easily disregarded, role in the way we perceive and interpret some forms of art.

Consider, for example, the punctuation in a poem. Apart from just detailing grammatical information, punctuation tells a reader when to pause and give a little moment of silence in the reading of a poem. Emily Dickinson’s poetry is famous for this. Often, rather than using traditional punctuation, Dickinson used dashes, which could be described as protracted visual instants of silence, to indicate pauses in her poetry. These pauses allow the reader time to stop and consider what has been said. For example, in Dickinson’s poem “My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun –,” the last stanza reads:

Though I than He – may longer live

He longer must – than I –

For I have but the power to kill,

Without – the power to die –

If you place an intentional pause at each dash, the poem takes on a different feel than if you just read it straight through. The dashes and pauses create a sense of hesitation and mystery, allowing a meaningful interpretation of the poem to truly begin to unravel for the reader

Artist, Jen Bervin, shows the importance of Dickinson’s dashes and consequently the importance of silence in Dickinson’s poems in a very unique way. Bervin has takes images of Dickinson’s fascicles and quilted them onto large sheets of muslin and silk. In several of these creations, she has sewn the words in black, but highlighted Dickinson’s unique punctuation in red, reinforcing the importance of that punctuation and the way in which it is read. To see images of Bervin’s work, go to http://www.jenbervin.com/html/dickinson.html.

In music, silence is the stable realm around which sound is constructed. In a concert hall, before a piece begins, the audience is expected to quiet down. In between pieces, once again, a hush will fall, and at the end of a piece, before the applause begins, there is another moment of silence. These pauses and silences take the audience through moments of anticipation, enjoyment, and resolution, allowing the listeners to build up excitement for the concert to come and then calmly let the experiences of the music come to a full and satisfactory resolution.

Ultimately, the role of silence is to uphold, reinforce, and allow time to digest the content that one has just enjoyed. It gives the listener or reader a chance to fully appreciate what they have just seen.

So, don’t forget to relish the silences. They may be small and unobtrusive, but they too are important.

Welcome back artsy readers!  In today’s news I would like to discuss the current exhibition happening on North Campus in the Slusser Gallery in the School of Art and Design.  I know many of you students out there have probably never ventured to North Campus, but you should, for there is a world to discover.

The exhibition is titled Creators Collect and it represents the collections of the School of A&D’s staff, from bones to comics to African American Church fans.  The special note about this exhibition is a glimpse into perceptions about value.  What is valued in our society?  Do these works of art tell a new or different story that alters the perceptions of those societal values?  The display of what may seem like random items all tell the individual story of histories and hobbies.  While these are individual collections, the exhibit is so profound because it places the viewer in different contexts with these material objects.  Removing yourself from material culture, as this exhibition does, and placing you before a recognizable object but blurring the normative function and role that that object has played in your existence is a unique experience in itself.

An example of this powerful reversal is seen in Marianetta Porter’s display of African American Church fans.  Here Marianetta has removed an everyday object, the fan, from its intended purposes and connotations to tell a history of African American culture in the United States.  When her interest was sparked in African American fans the results she came across while researching these material objects were limited and few.  This in itself surprised her and pushed her to uncover the truth behind these objects and their whereabouts.  On display are about 15 fans she has collected.  People who had their own collections sent some to her, once they heard about her interest, while others she accumulated along the way.

The fans are made out of a sturdy cardboard like substance attached to what looks like a Popsicle stick.  The fans’ function was to keep people cool during church.  Many people had their own personal fans they would bring with them every Sunday, but fans were also distributed before the service started.  These fans not only carried a functional role, but also displayed advertisements, were used as a surface for taking notes while in church, as well as a place to depict images of African American culture.  The fans on display range from the 1950’s to present day.  Like many objects that stand the test of time, parts of them transform while keeping the whole intact.  The changes seen in these church fans are in the images that take up one side of the fan.  The fans produced during the 1950’s are images of an African American family with a Mom, Dad and two children.  There are also pictures of an African American child next to a dog and an image of an African American Jesus.  These images mirror white portrayals during the time, and point to the fact that the people who were making these fans for African American churches were also disseminating them to white churches.  A more contemporary image shows President Obama.

Porter has taken an everyday object and displayed it to present viewers with a new way of thinking.  She is also telling a history that she values as an African American and wants to share with others.  Her collection is thought provoking, historical, and yet present all at once.  A true work of art, no doubt.

What happens when you take reality and multiply it, bend it, sculpt it, until a world that is simultaneously familiar and exhilaratingly new stretches before you?

Imagine an endless dreamscape that unfurls at your feet as you run; you are moving too quickly to see the details of what is around you, to imagine what lies ahead- but no matter, a city springs up wherever way you turn. It is impossible to consciously imagine such a highly-detailed world so instantaneously, and yet, it appears, seeming to build itself from the back catalogues of the fringes of your subconscious memory.

In an eerily reminiscent mix of Escher, Inception, and something else that just escapes definition, Jean Francois Rauzier’s highly surreal art evokes nothing less than a sense of awe.

Rauzier is best known for his hyperphotography. He arrives on a scene and shoots hundreds, sometimes upwards of a thousand images, gathering bits and pieces, angles and planes, flutes and cornices, sheen and grain. Windows, reflections, branches, ripples in the water. These are then stitched together and assembled into an environment so large and seamless it is difficult if not impossible to tell where one piece ends and another begins.

His galleries are worth taking the time to explore. Open images to fullsize; the viewer is interactive. Zoom in. And in. And in. Marvel. Pan over, repeat.

What you will find as you zoom in is that unlike a conventional photo, everything between the foreground and very distant background remains in sharp focus. Even when one thinks that the resolution has been maxed out- that there is no possible way to zoom in further without a mess of pixels- there is sharp detail. What appears to be a solid, if slightly mottled structure, turns out to be covered in windows and architectural details. Inside the windows are lamps. Furniture. Potted plants. And stretching out to the horizon, a veritable army of similarly mottled structures.

Rauzier’s work is an infinite labyrinth of visual treasures. One gets the sense of a meta-meta-meta-world, a recurring landscape in which the both the environment and what it contains might appear multiple times in various forms, but no one can quite put a finger on precisely what, when, and where, if at all. The closer one looks, the more there is to see.

It’s hard to not be fascinated.

It is only in an idealized world, one might think, that there could be such a richness of sensory opulence. But it’s not. It’s not. New details, interesting sights and things and facts are all there, are already there, all about you, waiting for you to notice them, for you to make the right connections.

What Rauzier does is merely put together permutations that have not yet occurred in this plane of existence.

The fall semester already begins to accelerate toward dazzling extremes — extremes of work load, extremes of red and gold, trickling in from the tips of the once temperate green leaves, extremes of cognitive activity and collegiate spirit, and of cold, and the extreme of being pressed to see and make choices, the vast number of choices that manifest on exam sheets in multiple choice bodies and choices that exist as real-life junctures where we stand in the crossroads. Everything is operating at this startling frequency industrious as ever, and this is how it is to be in college.

In order to make a brief escape from all the noise, I ventured to north campus to see the Engineering Social Change Fair, of which I was in part, initially attracted to because of the promised falafel and hummus pita spread. While the Middle Eastern food was exceptionally satisfying, this was to be expected. The presentation on the intersection between art and our immediate, present culture was one of those happy chance occurrences whose pleasantness becomes amplified by the fact it was unplanned. One of the keynote speakers for this event was Nick Tobier, an articulate associate professor of the School of Art & Design who spoke of his initiative of incorporating art into the arguably more “pragmatic” realm of people’s lives – that is, creating art that measurably betters a social group’s outlook on life. He recounted a story of being in New York, and being invigorated with excitement when he saw an elephant being paraded down one of the city streets after dusk. It was a miraculous sight, come to him during a stretch of his life when events more or less plateaued. Tobier said at the fair to an auditorium of students, that he knew in that moment that he “wanted to be someone else’s elephant.” And that’s exactly what he did.

Learning in college is being in classrooms and digesting theories and abstractions that require a great deal of working memory to hold in coherence. It’s like playing a game of chess, Tobier says, but how to extrapolate those rules that we twist and manipulate and are evaluated extensively on into the real-world? He began to create performing objects including a bicycle that channeled energy generated by the pedaling cyclist to light an overhanging chandelier. Additionally, he began spearheading larger scope community sustainability projects in Detroit — devoting his skills to develop a community farm in the cities and thus taking action to his belief of the right of access of all individuals to healthy whole foods.  (Click here for information on his other projects.) What interests him is the social-infused public spaces, and tangible interactions that occur between people. He is inspired by the power of social dynamism and the potential it holds. What he says to the room of students is that, being students, we are inherently already privileged. Tobier urges us all to turn our privileges inside out and build each other’s capacitance. Through art, or through whatever avenue of study that we have selected, we should seek to do this, to use our chosen craft as a conduit. This is wise advice. My mind couldn’t help but jump to my biopsychology lecture on theories that explained the evolution of the increasing human neocortex volume. The social hypothesis suggests that the reason our brain is so comparatively large to other mammals is because of our interactions with each other, our adaptive social inclination, and the necessary behavioral sophistications that come as a result. We are community creatures.

As the pace of the semester quickens, it’s easy to lose yourself in the stacks of readings and the numbers that culminate to a grade point average. Take a step back, and think of yourself not as a single unit, busying away into the depths of the night but an active participant in the communities you associate yourself with. Turn yourself, as Nick Tobier says, inside out and see what comes of it.

Sue majors in Neuroscience & English and tends to lurk in bookstores.

Paper seems to have a life of its own.  From being just the blank canvas on which artists worked to becoming life-size sculptures, paper has undergone many transformations since its origins.  What is most extraordinary is how paper is now being used to understand science; in this case, specifically the genetic basis of Alzheimer’s.

Matt Shlian’s title is a Paper Engineer who folds paper sculptures.  But his work isn’t like that of Peter Callesen’s, whose cannily life-like sculptures are undoubtedly ethereal works of art.  For Shlian, his work is not just founded upon artistic principles and desire to create, it is also based on the curiosity and desire to utilize his skills as an artist engineer to furthering scientific knowledge.  As he writes in his artist’s statement, in the way that paper folds, so does DNA, and protein mis-folding is what results in Alzheimer’s Disease.  One misstep in the folding process leads to further a chain of folding mishaps which causes irregularities and disease.  In order to explore the causalities and possibilities of how protein could mis-fold, Shlian creates replica of protein structures made from paper– a highly scientific yet artistic work.

Upon first hearing about this man and the phenomena which he creates, I was astounded.  Here is one very great example of how art is being utilized for more than just the typically perceived reason of self-expression.  Here is one awesome counterexample to those who continually say that art is merely for art’s sake and that it is irrelevant in the larger picture.  Shlian’s paper folding that helps us understand the roots of Alzheimer’s shows us that art is as intertwined in this world as any other discipline; without art, we would not understand science.  Without the ability to manipulate designs, to create visual representations of the scientific realm, it would be hard to comprehend the microscopic in visual terms.

I wish I could fold DNA structures.  That’s cool.