CMU gallery challenges viewer

Plastic Poetics Regina Gouger MIller Gallery 5000 Forbes Ave. Carnegie Mellon University Runs until Feb. 22 Call 412-268-3618 for hours

“I feel turned inside out, I feel like I am a part of the art,” Kelly Stewart, a freshman at Carnegie Mellon, said of Colin Zaug’s walk-in, inflatable sculpture that balloons enticingly at the forefront of “Plastic Poetics.” The exhibit opened Friday, Jan.18 at Carnegie Mellon’s Regina Gouger Miller Gallery.

“The work is explosive and aggressive, graphic and organic, strong on its own and even stronger together,” exhibit curator Cara Erskine said.

“Plastic Poetics” fuses the verbal with the visual, featuring sculpture and installation art by four different artists.

“Combining the visual and the verbal has always been an interest of mine, either in my own work as a painter or in separate intellectual pursuits, so this show felt very natural for me to put together,” Erskine said.

Upon entering the gallery, guests are met by Zaug’s cloud-like, inflatable sculpture, which Erskine says, “flips the gallery space on its head,” preparing viewers for the experience of the next two floors.

“It’s a major physical force to be confronted with as you enter the space. It is mysterious, inviting you in, but pushing you out of the space, and making you walk around it, all at the same time,” Erskine said.

Traversing the walls of the three-story gallery, Ian Finch’s Venn diagram poems “of Colin Zaug,” “of Maya Schindler” and “of Sarah E. Wood” seek to explore relationships between words and phrases by juxtaposing them in space. Because Finch wrote the poems in response to the artists’ work, they serve to ignite a discourse between his own musings and their respective exhibits.

“The poetic use of text in [Finch’s] and my pieces enhances the meaning of our individual work, as well as the viewer’s understanding of it,” Maya Schindler, a featured artist, said.

The second floor of the gallery is devoted to Schindler’s work. Words and idioms serve as the raw material for her sculptures.

“I’m not trying so much to change a word’s meaning as I am trying to open up the meaning to the viewer by showing that we take certain words for granted,” Schindler said. In her foam sculpture, “The Benefit of the Doubt,” Schindler creates a graduated monument, in which each letter of the title phrase constitutes a different level. The letters in Schindler’s pieces are often warped and distorted, forcing the viewer to crouch, stoop or contort his or her body in order to grasp their meaning.

“Trying to figure out what each piece says really gets you into what [Schindler] is trying to say,” CMU graduate student Akiva Leffert said.

Sarah E. Wood’s work is featured on the third floor of the gallery. Her sculptures in plastic, vinyl and rubber are done entirely in black.

“I’m interested in limiting the factors so that every group seems like a body of work. Color is just not a decision I’m interested in making,” Wood said. The negation of color is meant to draw attention to other aspects of her sculptures such as line and shape.

Crafted from vinyl tubing and fabric, “Puddle Shadow,” travels from ceiling to floor in a series of linked ovals that grow progressively smaller. Its shadow, as in all of Wood’s featured pieces, is a visual non-sequitur – two black circles punctured with dozens of tiny holes. “Diamond Shadow” drapes from the ceiling in sinewy tentacles that hover above a jagged shadow that suggests broken glass or stylized lightning.

“I’m trying to call into question the relationship between an object and its shadow,” Wood said. “Sometimes my source of inspiration is more obvious, like plants, but with other pieces it’s more of an offhand gesture towards something in nature.”

Houseplants are the clear inspiration behind “Shadow Plants,” which challenges perceptions of everyday objects by transforming them into dark, alternate-universe versions of themselves.

“Pittsburgh is very hungry for new art, for good art. I think ‘Plastic Poetics’ raises the bar, which is always a good thing, said Erskine. “I hope [the exhibit] will knock people’s socks off, get them talking and keep them coming back for more.”