A Stranger Comes to Town
By Natalia Quiñones
This year’s Spring Break Art Show featured works on the theme of “A Stranger Comes to Town.” Some of the art was inspired by current events, such as a piece titled Black and Blue created by Michael Zelehoski, which focused on the New York Police Department. “The Black and Blue are blockades weaved into two dimensional composition symbolizing the power of the NYPD,” the exhibit reads. “To manifest order onto a society that wants to stand up for what’s right.”
The Cosmic Wall, a performance by Danish artist Anne Nowak, features 250 bricks that are stacked and then taken down one brick at a time during the show. Exhibit notes say the wall symbolizes “alienating, excluding effects of the border currently and historically being built around the world.” The bricks are spray painted in a cosmic, blue paint, the notes explain, in order to symbolize how walls are universal. They can be built here in the United States but also in China, Berlin and so on.
“History is full of examples of how man has built walls as a shield against the unknown,” says Henriette Noermark in her exhibit notes. “Anne Nowak’s performance destroys the wall, stone by stone and articulates issues as seen from the stranger’s perspective.” Anne Nowak says the Cosmic Wall is a tribute to a more hopeful time. “I was young in the eighties, in an age when it was about tearing down walls, abolishing borders and seeking community and diversity,” she says. “That’s the spirit I would like to pay tribute to.”
You’ll Never Know We Were Here, by Fernando Orellana features “robo activists” that are waving protest signs, “We Are Home,” “We Are All Immigrants,” “We The People,” “No Being Is Illegal.” These machines unlike humans, reads the exhibit, “don’t have to worry about reprisal for expressing their message.”
The Poetry of Earth, by Rachel Marks, takes the audience into a world of books and nature with an elaborate series of paper sculptures. Pages are twisted into tree trunks. Pages fall from the walls, forming a curtain of paper. According to the artist, the work symbolizes beginnings and that everything that we have, not just books, come from trees and the earth we take for granted.
Other work included: Junny Just Came, by James Ostrer, Sometimes They Have To Kill Us by Andrew Erdos, After Me by Andy Harman, A Pressing Conference by Macon Reed.
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