By Maggie Cassidy
Last year, assistant graphic design professor Isabel Meirelles began a project that drew from the two classes she oversees at Northeastern. Meirelles created a 51-second movie in which green and blue squares moved diagonally, and then printed about six frames for each second in the movie and arranged them in a series of diagrams on posters.
“I started thinking of how I could study motion in its static form,” she said. “I was just compressing time.”
The end product, completed earlier this year and titled “Space-time study #5,” is a dynamic array of geometric shapes in varying blue and green shades, and is one of several art projects on display today at the premiere of the annual faculty art exhibition, titled “Back to Work.”
The exhibition, which will remain at the Curry Student Center Art Gallery through Nov. 30, is an annual showing of new, recent work by members of the faculty of the art and design department, said Ann Steuernagel, an assistant professor in the visual art department.
“You have these people ‘blah blah blah’ all day in your face, and here’s a chance to see what they actually do,” she said.
Steuernagel helped organize the show with Mary Hughes, the department’s head slide librarian. Steuernagel and Meirelles are among the exhibition’s 12 artists.
Faculty members Sophia Ainslie, Edwin Andrews, Mira Cantor, Julie Curtis, John Kane, Ann McDonald, Neal Rantoul, Andrea Raynor, Matthew Rich and Tom Starr also contributed.
All 12 are featured on the event’s promotional poster – but not with typical headshots. Instead, they are identified with snapshots of the backs of their heads. The idea of the poster is simply to catch students’ attention, Steuernagel said.
“Art’s really important to your life,” she said. “You have working artists on campus, and for those people who are interested in art I think it would be very interesting.”
Meirelles agreed, and said she hopes the exhibition attracts students of all majors while showing what the art department faculty is working on.
“It’s part of what we do on a daily basis,” she said. “I think the important part of the exhibition is to actually get other people to see what we do and get other people to create forms of dialogue.”
Steuernagel said the exhibition features photography, painting, drawing, graphic design, sculptures and video.
Starr, for example, used photography to document youth reaction to Boston’s violence in recent decades. City children briefly described victims they knew with phrases like “he had the cutest smile,” which were then painted on an MBTA bus and photographed. The outcome is Starr’s “Remembering Boston’s Children 1980-2005.”
“I think what might appeal to people is the fact that it’s a very diverse exhibition,” Steuernagel said. “So if perhaps people don’t understand painting and drawing but they have a better understanding of photography, they might be attracted to the photography but also have a chance to look at the painting and drawing, sculpting, etc. It’s a little bit of something for everybody.”
