Handwerker Gallery Newsletter

Winter 2002 – Volume 3, Number 3

IC Students Comment on Exhibition

This fall I invited students in my theater affiliate writing class to respond to the Handwerker Gallery’s exhibition of Jamaican art, In the Fullness of Time. I asked the students to write a description of one particular piece, exploring a connection between visual art and performed art. Below are four excerpts from essays the classes and I thought were especially interesting.
--- Jeanne Mackin
Department of Writing

Response to Bouganville, Jamaica Missing Landscape by Oya Tyehimba

As audience members at a theatrical performance, we are forced to confront reality and to listen to the playwright’s message. The same is true for physical art, where the audience must also must face the reality in the work and develop an understanding of the artist’s statement. Oya Tyehimba’s collage is an astounding piece of art. Its large size and vivid image attracts the observer’s eyes. The colors are mainly grays, blacks, browns, and red, with some blue on top for the sky. Tyehimba and playwright Arthur Miller have similar approaches to their work. They both expose reality and criticize society. Tyehimba’s collage shows images of chaos and war, and depicts what man’s absurdity has done to the "landscape." The only things that we see are guns, dirt, and bloodshed. In the same way, Miller’s plays criticize faults in human nature, asking the audience to question his or her own actions. In the play All My Sons, the foolishness of man destroys the lives of many people. Tyehimba suggests that since humans have such a violent nature, perhaps the monkeys in his work of art are smarter. The only creatures in the collage without guns, perhaps they have figured out how to live peacefully.

--- Shannon Baker ’05

Response to Mountain Music Series by George Rodney

This particular piece represents the way many humans perceive life and its daily odds and ends. The foreground portrays the presence of both the positives and negatives of our daily life. On the left, turmoil is shown through the application of darker colors and the introduction of what seems to be a deep canyon. The right establishes joy, happiness, and contentment through the use of brighter colors that are associated with those emotions. The backdrop of mountains provides a focal point for the work, representing humanity’s desire to find a more perfect world, one without the constant pull between good and evil.

This piece has a strong theatrical reference to the musical The Sound of Music in both setting and theme. The mountains and lushness of the valley depict what the playwright saw in the setting of the musical. Philosophical ties exist as well. The von Trapp family has many choices affected by the good and evil present in their surroundings.

--- Bryan Briggs ’05

Response to Field #4 by Peter Wayne Lewis

I see a Kurosawa dream. A broken window looks upon a battlefield, brown with ancient blood. A grounded angel cries. The light comes in three colors, black, white, and brown, because that’s how everyone knows the world: black before and after, white as the shade that leads into both, and brown as the earth we live on. These mix and swirl, and deep within them one can find the next phase, the enlightenment that lies just one stop beyond. You can almost feel the colors washing behind your eyes, behind your mind. Is this what the Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa saw; did he close his eyes only to find more than they could ever look upon? All dream, but who listens? Children are crying because the angels have no more dark tears to shed. The only way out is to just give in and let your mind stop screaming: Sense! Then you might, for a moment, see with clarity the vertical field in a window surrounded by the black brain sea. There is electric light, electric life, and in the middle is the splash of Kurosawa’s dreams.

--- Nicholas Allen ’04

Response to Mystic Bird by Kofi Kayiga

Some paintings showed boundaries that one could not break through. Struggle is the key in this exhibit. I found Kofi Kayiga’s painting of the bird wrapped by its wings most interesting. Posed against a colorful background, the bird filled most of the length of the painting. It was different shades of blue, with the head a darker shade and the body a silvery blue. The head is all you can see of the bird, as the wings envelop the rest. It almost seems as if the bird is ready to break out, open his wings, and fly. This painting reminds me of the character of Laura in Tennessee Williams’ play The Glass Menagerie. Laura, like the bird, needs to break free. Although very shy, she has a whole life inside that she wants to let out, but does not know how. The bird and Laura are safe and sheltered, but their true beauty will not be fully shown until they open up. If I could, I would place this painting right above the bed in Laura’s room.

--- Katrina Foy ’05