The next time you take a bus on Campus Drive, look for a new art exhibit displayed not at the Nasher Museum of Art, but hanging from trees.
Artist Robert McConaughy's piece, an outdoor installation called "Nine Lines," includes nine metal chains all connecting to one central tree in a starburst pattern.
"It really depends how the sun's hitting that day as to what you can see and what glimmer is coming off the chains," said senior Tara Zepel, chair of the Duke University Union's Visual Arts Committee. "It's very in tune with nature." Though the exhibit is scheduled to end in early February, Zepel and McConaughy both hope the work will have a chance to become more integrated with the environment with time-such as freezing over during ice storms.
The Visual Arts Committee is sponsoring "Nine Lines;" the committee also runs the Brown Gallery in the Bryan Center. Every year, the student-run committee juries artists' submissions for the Brown Gallery, and this year, McConaughy was one of the chosen artists. However, "Nine Lines" is an outdoor installation, which cannot be displayed in the gallery.
Unlike a previous outdoor exhibit on campus, "Road in Sight," "Nine Lines" is a quieter, less publicized piece of art. "[McConaughy] is more hoping that people will pass by and wonder," Zepel said. "Their curiosity will force them to go into the art exhibit, so to speak, and really have the exhibit surround them."
Zepel believes "Nine Lines" is a powerful display, but not so "in-your-face" that it takes away from McConaughy's vision of environmentally integrated artwork. Much of McConaughy's work is harmonized with its surroundings but requires the viewer to explore it as well.
McConaughy also runs a 22-acre farm in Blue Ash, Ohio that has been in his family since the 1920s. The McConaughys are dedicated to sharing their environment with the surrounding community. "Mac's Farm" includes a community garden and is deemed a place, "where art and agriculture co-exist."
The outdoor nature of "Nine Lines" indeed makes it very public art. Unaffiliated with the Nasher Museum of Art, the student panel on the Visual Arts Committee chose to host McConaughy's art because art contained in galleries often suffers from what Zepel calls, "white-cube syndrome," where the art is untouchable and in an enclosed space. But "Nine Lines" is just one example of art aiming to break this boundary between artist and viewer, making the art more interactive and part of everyday life.
"You might hear people say that Duke's very one-sided-they only focus on the sciences, there's no creativity on campus-which is completely untrue, because creativity exists in the sciences, too," Zepel said. "There's been a big push by President Brodhead and the administration to help foster this creativity. As a student group, we wanted to bring our contribution to it by initiating and showing that students want this, too."
The Visual Arts Committee's major goal is to act as students' initial point of contact for supporting the arts on campus-one that already has an established set of resources.
"We're out there to support student desires in the art world," said Zepel of artistic creation on campus and beyond.
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