News

News Release
Contact: Kelly Bird
216-421-7403
kbird@gate.cia.edu

Faculty Exhibition On View and Open to The Public
November 24 – December 21, 2007

Cleveland, OH – Digital video art and a thought-provoking billboard will add new dimensions to an exhibition of photography, painting, sculpture, and work in glass, enamel, ceramics, fiber, metal and other media in The Cleveland Institute of Art’s 2007 Faculty Exhibition, which opens Saturday, November 24 in the college’s Reinberger Galleries, located in the Gund Building at the corner of East Blvd. and Bellflower Rd. in University Circle.

At the Institute, all faculty members are active artists or designers with studio or commercial practices. Work in a variety of media by more than 50 faculty members representing all of the Institute’s 16 majors, will demonstrate the breadth of their creativity, vision and talent in this show, which will be on view through December 21.

A reception with the artists will be held on Friday, December 7, from 6:00 until 9:00 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.

Digital Arts will Challenge Perceptions
Several innovative works of digital art will be included in the show. The installation “Ripon” will put a new twist on the idea of getting immersed in a video game. “Ripon” will integrate the original video game by Troy Richards, assistant professor and Drawing Department head, and Knut Hybinette, assistant professor of digital arts, with a set of large-scale digital prints they have fashioned into an eight-foot by eight-foot shack.

The game is set in a violent, dehumanized society named for Ripon, Wisconsin, an actual town founded on the writings of the French Utopian writer Charles Fourier. The fictional Ripon is the opposite of a utopian society and, with its three-dimensional elements, becomes a truly immersive experience. The installation, which was displayed in a New York gallery last summer and is headed to a Chicago gallery in January, is designed to “upset the conventions of gaming culture,” Richards said.

A different sort of digital innovation will be represented in the work of Lane Cooper, assistant professor, and Charles Tucker, Integrated Media Environment chair. Their four-minute video, “Soundhouse,” begins with a silhouette of a man making repetitive, ritual-like motions. The images become increasingly abstracted as the voice-over suggests ideas of loss and disintegration. “The rhythm of the work is meant to reflect slow breathing and interior mental space,” Cooper explained.

Enamel Works feature “Painterly” Quality
Among several faculty members working in traditional media, Gretchen Goss will submit a series of two-dimensional enameled pieces titled “Gesture and Ornament.” Goss, chair of the Material Culture Environment and professor of enameling, created this series as a reflection of the random and chaotic images seen in gardens gone awry. “I started my education in painting and it really comes through in this work,” she said.

Public Art Comes Indoors
Christian Wulffen, associate professor of foundation, will present a billboard from “How to Improve Your English,” a large-scale public art project he exhibited in Youngstown this past summer. He investigates visual and structural systems of language in his work, which shows images of all 343 pages of a book on architecture superimposed with images of 1,000 English vocabulary flashcards. “Interesting contexts arose when the flashcards and the pages came together,” he noted.

About the Reinberger Galleries at CIA
Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Sunday, noon to 6 p.m. The gallery is closed on Mondays. The Institute’s Reinberger Galleries are located in the Gund Building, 11141 East Boulevard. Several pieces in the Faculty Exhibition will be available for purchase. For directions or other information, please visit www.cia.edu or call 216-421-7000.

About The Cleveland Institute of Art
Founded in 1882 as The Western Reserve School of Design for Women and later known by the name The Cleveland School of Art, The Cleveland Institute of Art is an independent college of art and design committed to leadership and vision in all forms of visual arts education. For the past 125 years, the Institute has made enduring contributions to art and education and extends its programs to the public through gallery exhibitions, talks and lectures, a continuing education program and, for the past 20 years, the screenings of independent, art, and retrospective films through The Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque.