By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Charles Kanwischer, director of the BGSU School of Art, is on a mission.
He’s headed from the glass studio in the Fine Arts Building through the Wolfe Center to get an ArtsX t-shirt for a supporter of the arts. His brisk walk with a reporter in tow transverses the muddle that is ArtsX.
Kanwischer is trying to define ArtsX. It’s a time for students to showcase and sell their arts. It’s community outreach.
And given the number of stops along with way to chat, certainly a social occasion.
Then he hits on the phrase that best captures ArtsX: “It’s shaggy.”
Given students’ prominent role in organizing it, that’s not surprising. “It’s never overly polished,” he said.
And that he concedes sometimes has not gone over well with some in the university.
But, he adds, arriving at his destination, the Wolfe box office, “I love it.”
ArtsX was held on campus Saturday evening.
The event gives visitors and students a chance to try their hands or feet in new creative endeavors.
Tim Frost, a first-year master’s student in theater, is giving students Kalee Moore and Jamie Stopczynski a lesson in dancing the rhumba. The students hadn’t met before the lesson started.
Frost said he appreciated the idea of ArtsX as “a great way for the arts to come alive and be here in the community.”
This also gave him a chance to show another side of his talent – he’s a certified Arthur Murray ballroom dance instructor and would like to offer classes on campus.
Gerard Nadeau, an assistant professor in architecture, is at work filling in a stick-built tunnel inside the scene shop of the Wolfe Center and encouraging others to join the effort. He’s done similar works in other places. They are a way to involve the community in an art project. Anyone, he said, can show up and add a piece, or they can just admire it.
The main structure was built earlier by architecture and construction management students, giving those studying in those two School of the Built Environment a chance to collaborate.
“This gives us a chance to show we are part of this larger BGSU creative community,” the architect said.
Around the corner in an animation studio, student Jalah Stokes was working on a project of making marks directly on film. A film major and ArtsX volunteer, Stokes said that this is “a perfect opportunity” to connect with students in other disciplines who they can collaborate with.
Another volunteer Darla Arnett, a musical theatre major, who was working nearby, said it was a way to try out a new medium and expand her creative horizons.
That holds true for established artists.
Katie Caron, the featured guest artist, was standing in the balcony of the Willard Wankleman Gallery and looking down on her installation “The Middle Landscape.” The “forest” is constructed from Styrofoam used in making concrete and rubber forms from making dog toys. It is a statement on the environmental harm of consumerism. On the walls and Styrofoam tree trunks, images of a Colorado park of projected and the sounds from the scene, with a Northern Flicker playing a starring role, fill the air.
This is the most dynamic setting of any of the galleries she’s shown it in, Caron said.
The balcony allows people – at least able-bodied people, she noted –look down on the structure. And below they can walk among it, their shadows becoming part of the scene.
Caron said she started in theater, but not scene design. She was a director. Now she prefers to create the scenes. With “The Middle Landscape,” the viewers become the actors.
Abigail Cloud, of the Creative Writing faculty and one of the ArtsX organizers, said that this kind of fluidity among the arts is what the event is all about.
Earlier in the week she sang in the University Choral Society’s Joyous Sounds concert and spoke about how much she enjoyed the chorus and how much she’d learned from the director Mark Munson.
The event has its own theatrical flair with a shifting cast of characters.
ArtsX presents the opportunity to catch up with people not seen in a while and find out what they’ve been up to. Usually that’s something to do with the arts.
Rodney Rogers, the president of the university, and his wife, Sandy Earle, were part of the cast. Rogers was his affable self, picking up two poetic ‘zines written and illustrated by student Aurora Michaelsen and recalling to one of the glass students selling ornaments that he’d purchased one of her glass gnomes at the Black Swamp Arts Festival. The gnome was on display at University House.
No art is more theatrical in its creation than glass. Inside the glass studio, art technician Tim Spurchise and his students were creating one of his fanciful glass sea creatures while a couple dozen people watched as the glass blower and his crew drew the fish from the glory hole and shaped it with more heat.
Another of these whimsical monsters was on display in the Faculty and Staff Exhibition in the Bryan Gallery, which continues through Dec. 11.
Caron’s landscape though was being disassembled on Sunday. You just had to be at ArtsX to experience it.
