New to the Raymond James Stutz Art Gallery in January is “Landscape: Structural, Ethereal” with work from Wug Laku, Ginny Taylor-Rosner and Marna Shopoff. In the exhibition opening Jan. 17, artists consider how man-made structures affect landscapes and how landscapes affect a culture’s written language, art, and craft. That night, the artists will each give a brief talk beginning at 6:30 p.m.
“We’re reinventing the gallery,” said Elise Schweitzer, a painter and the new director of the Raymond James Stutz Art Gallery. “Our guiding direction is three-fold: to promote Stutz artists, engage the community, and inspire ourselves. We’ll also have a voice behind each show.”
Ginny Taylor-Rosner explores this topic through photography that highlights the connection of wind mills to the land on northern Indiana’s wind turbine farms. “As the seasons, weather, and light change, the turbines take on new relationships with the land,” she said.
Marna Shopoff’s oil paintings use abstractions of architecture to explore the structural landscape where we live. She focuses on a topical event and reinterprets it, using architectural structures as a means for overlapping time and memory.
Wug Laku digitally manipulates photos so the landscape reflects itself. As he worked, he noticed how repeating patterns in landscape influence a culture. “Chinese calligraphy seems to look like China’s landscape, Arab script flows like the desert, Nordic runes echo the fjords and mountains, Hebrew the cliffs, valleys, and plains,” he wrote in his artist’s statement. “The American language, like so much of our culture, is borrowed and adapted. If we had an American language, what would it look like, and what would it say?”
The exhibition runs for six weeks, with an opening reception on Jan. 17 and a First Friday reception on Feb. 1. Cost is free. Enter the Stutz from 10th Street via Bearcat Alley.
For more information, visit www.stutzartists.com or call (317) 503-6420.
