“Earth is a Snowball,” an exhibition of work by faculty in the West Virginia University School of Art and Design, opened with a public reception on Sept. 10 at the WVU Canady Creative Arts Center.
“I was thrilled with how well attended it was, especially to see a diverse cross-section of community members, students, faculty and staff—all from different disciplines and departments,” said Dylan Collins, associate professor of sculpture and the faculty lead for the exhibition. “The enthusiasm from the public was really notable. There was a lot of excitement and people wanted to stop in and see what we’re doing.”
The School of Art and Design hosts an exhibit of faculty work every four to five years.
“It’s an important teaching tool in the sense that we get to show students that we are research-driven artists,” Collins said. “Because of WVU’s R1 nature, it’s important we can show that while our artwork is beautiful and made of exciting materials, it’s also a large part of our research agendas.”
Shenandoah Young is a senior dual-majoring in Painting and Photography. She has seen a few examples of her professors’ art used in the classroom, but the exhibition was her first time seeing their personal artwork.
“It's really inspiring, from a student perspective, to get to see my professors still creating work and still being passionate about something while also teaching,” said Young. “It’s great that their work in their personal life can help give us insight into what we’ll be going into in the future.”
Collins recalled how important it was for him as a student to see that his instructors were still creating art as well.
“I cherished seeing that my teachers were makers and thinkers with skin in the game, so to speak,” he said. “I think it’s a big deal for our students to see that we’re in it with them.”
"Earth is a Snowball" is spread across both Mesaros Galleries. (Photo by Jessica Nelson)
The ecology of art
While Collins took the lead from the faculty side, Sam Boehm, exhibition coordinator for the Art Museum of WVU and the Mesaros Galleries, crafted the theme to tie all the disparate works and mediums together.
“All these artists are coming from different perspectives and different kinds of work,” said Boehm. “So this was an opportunity to show the breadth of work coming out of the School of Art and Design.”
Boehm’s concept “Earth is a Snowball” was inspired by the geohistorical hypothesis “Snowball Earth,” coined by Joseph Kirschvink in 1992, that says that our world was completely frozen, or at least in a slushy state, for a period of some hundreds of millions of years. This global freeze is said to have ushered in the Avalon and Cambrian explosions, sudden evolutionary events during which metazoan biodiversity massively increased. This inhospitable state may have been the bottleneck that triggered multicellularity, the origin of what we know as complex life.
As the introduction to the gallery states, “We humans fear stagnation—whether personal, economic, or environmental—as these too might result in an irreversible snowball. But it is precisely this period of incubation that welcomes the next stage. Growth is still underway while we wait for better conditions. It is this cycle of reflection and creation that drives the faculty of the School of Art and Design. It is what inspires their shared research interests of sustainability and a global understanding of our place in the world. There is no thaw without freeze, no success without struggle, no growth without stagnation. Sometimes, Earth is a snowball.”
“I wanted to come up with something that was ecological, thinking about how old and strange the Earth is and how it has this ebb and flow of flourishing diversity, then lack thereof,” said Boehm. “That’s similar to the way artists work, so it felt relevant, even if in a peripheral way.”
In this full gallery view, Nichole van Beek's "Cherry Millipede" can be seen on the left wall while Jason Zeh's “A Grinding Sensation in the Ley Lines and Arteries” can be seen on the right. (Photo by Jessica Nelson)
The artwork from Jason Zeh, service assistant professor of Art and digital media manager, and Nichole van Beek, assistant professor of Painting and Foundations, are located on opposite walls and feel equally opposite in their style and materials, but they share a common thread. Both grapple with humans’—often destructive—relationship with nature from two very different perspectives.
van Beek’s work “Cherry Millipede” is a painting made entirely of natural dyes, some of which come from plants in the dye garden at the WVU Canady Creative Arts Center.
“Natural dye is usually used for textiles or other applications, but not so often in painting, so that’s been my main area of research,” said van Beek. “I use them just like paint. No synthetic additives. It’s all natural and biodegradable, and I love that it makes the works more temporary. We talking about the environment being in crisis. Do we really need to make paintings that last hundreds of years?”
Zeh’s work, as he pointed out, is all synthetic.
Zeh treated reception attendees to a live performance of his audio-visual piece, “A Grinding Sensation in the Ley Lines and Arteries,” which projects a combination of cyber- and forest-inspired patterns and 3D model images onto the gallery wall that move and change according to the music and sound effects.
“The main technical side of my research right now is figuring out ways to build audio-video instruments that can perform in real time like you would any other instrument,” said Zeh. “I’m both controlling the geometry of the 3D models in the video projection, and I'm controlling audio like musical instruments. I'm working a lot on getting the audio and the video talking to each other in different ways.”
“Digital artists are implicated in the environmentally catastrophic industries surrounding technology,” continued Zeh. “This piece, for me, is a way to grapple with the conflicted relationship between creation and destruction of the natural world.”
Jason Zeh treats reception attendees to a live performance of his audio-visual piece, “A Grinding Sensation in the Ley Lines and Arteries.” (Photo by Jessica Nelson)
Artists at work
The ethos in the School of Art and Design is centered in hands-on art making, so it’s inevitable that professors’ work spills over into the classroom.
“I don’t know what I would be teaching if I wasn’t so engageed in my own creative work. I’m teaching students how to get involved in their own ideas,” van Beek said. “I’m also bringing in a lot of what I’m learning and working with outside the classroom, like mushroom Styrofoam and kombucha leather. This is just the cutting edge of where design is going, and students need to know that these materials exist and start forming ideas for how to use them.”
For Zeh, as a working artist, one of the most important lessons he can impart to his students is the value of finding their artistic community.
“Once you get out of college, you’re not surrounded by people who are invested in you,” said Zeh. “So the skill of finding your community, finding where your work fits, and getting that support and encouragement—that’s what my art practice brings to the classroom.”
At the same time, his work as a professor has expanded his skillset as an artist.
“There have been times where I perceive some gap in what I am able to teach the students, so I start trying to fill in that gap,” Zeh said. “I learn new skills that, of course, I am then going to put into practice in my own work.”
Annie McFarland, a teaching assistant professor of Art Therapy, contributed a mixed-media collage titled “A Woman’s Place,” inspired by a hospice client who had been discouraged from pursuing art.
Annie McFarland, a teaching assistant professor of Art Therapy, contributed a mixed-media collage titled “A Woman’s Place." (Photo by Jessica Nelson)
“As art therapists, we get so focused on helping other people make art that we lose our own art practice, so it’s important to share my artwork and show students that I’m making stuff for myself, too,” she said. “Making time for art as self-care and creating art for emotional expression and processing experiences is super important.”
Collins believes that being an artist and an educator requires continual learning.
“You’re always finding new ways to approach familiar materials,” he said. “And sometimes students come up with creative ways of doing things that take you by surprise and inspire you.”
“Earth is a Snowball” will be on display in the Paul and Laura Mesaros Galleries until Nov. 4. The Messaros Galleries are open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday and one hour prior to Discovery and Curiosity Series events.
Learn more about the WVU School of Art and Design at artanddesign.wvu.edu and follow the School on Facebook and Instagram.