Editor’s note: Photos are from students in COMM 1318 Photography 1. Featured photo by Jayden Morris.
Sometimes it’s hard to tell something is art, even when you stare right at it. Don’t believe it?
Try strolling through the Christine Devitt Fine Arts Center on the South Plains College Levelland campus this week.
If you look straight down the main hall, you see what looks a little like laundry hanging across the ceiling.
When you get closer, you see it’s actually pieces of cloth twisted into a rope along with bits of sparkly diamond shaped paper and CDs.
This is just one of nearly a dozen 3D art projects on display now from students in Kara Donatelli’s Art 1312 Design II class. Donatelli says the projects had to be completely abstract and students had to use “found” materials
“So, they have to figure out what they can get enough of,” Donatelli says, “how they can put those materials together so they stay together and stay up.”
Found materials here include linked plastic hangers and yarn.
Several other students used yarn too, either cut and attached to the wall, or crocheted and suspended from the ceiling.
A few feet away another student used cloth material sewn together and attached to the wall.
While another featured material draped across the floor.
The two large projects closest to the front doors use a lot of plastic. Reams of clear plastic wrap around a pole secured with blue tape and woven onto a nearby bench.
Next to the bench, a bloom of plastic grocery bags sprouts from another pole – this one covered with pastel ribbons.
Ironically, the project made from energy drink cans collapsed on the floor because the tape securing it to the wall gave way.
And finally, it’s almost easy to miss a large project near the back doors. It’s easy to miss because at first glance it resembles an actual unfinished electrical construction job. It features twisted cords and sockets of various colors and thicknesses spilling out of the ceiling and onto the floor.
Abstract? Yes. Found materials? Yes.
And the electrical cords exemplify another one of this assignment’s requirements. Donatelli explains students were asked to create an “actual line” that turns into an “implied line” somewhere.
“So an actual line being like this physical line,” she says, pointing to the red, yellow, and beige streams of electrical cords falling out of the ceiling. “An applied line being like a dotted line,” she finishes, pointing out the intervals of white electrical sockets. From a distance, the white sockets create a dotted line.
Donatelli explains this art assignment is partly designed to help students expand on what they think art is.
“A lot of people think it’s just something pretty,” she says. “And if it’s something pretty, that’s usually something that the viewers don’t really look at very long because it’s boring.”
Donatelli says these projects should be on display for a couple of weeks.
What’s next?
Papier-mâché food pieces she says, but they won’t be finished until about the second week of March.
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