'Tenth Biennial Faculty Exhibition' at McDaniel College
Nov. 9—The "Tenth Biennial Faculty Exhibition" at McDaniel College highlights a variety of works by current art faculty members at the college. The exhibition runs through Dec. 10 in McDaniel's Rice Gallery, Peterson Hall, at 2 College Hill, Westminster.
This exhibition is a rare opportunity to see the range and depth of works by select McDaniel faculty members. A wide range of media, styles and subject matter are showcased, including paintings by Steven Pearson, the Joan Develin Coley chair in Creative Expression and the Arts, and intermedia and digital art by assistant professor Chloe Irla, who is a 2007 alumna of the college. Other works include images and wall sculpture by adjunct lecturer Chinen Aimi Bouilon, photography by senior adjunct lecturer Walter P. Calahan, pottery and ceramics by adjunct lecturer Nicole Diem and mixed-media by adjunct lecturer and 2016 McDaniel alumna Nicole Ringel.
Rice Gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday and noon to 5 p.m. Saturday. Call 410-857-2595 for more information, or visit mcdaniel.edu.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Chinen Aimi Bouilon, adjunct lecturer, is an artist working as an anthropological detective. By investigating semiotic relationships and identifying territories of contradiction, she uncovers hidden histories. This creative research is rooted in Feminist International Relations, which focus on intersections of gender, power and war. Her approach is rooted in the transformative potential of social sculpture and the power of Ryukyu Sosensuhai (Ancestors Worship), while also acknowledging the realities of globalization. Bouilon notes that she was born to an Indigenous Ryukyu mother and a U.S. Marine father, a byproduct of the colonized and the colonizer. Through affective objects that relate and stimulate emotions from the past and present, she aims to share the ritual of spherical thinking — that is, meaning shaped through the historical consideration of time and space — in hopes of stimulating the power of the collective unconscious and possibilities of peace.
Walter P. Calahan, senior adjunct lecturer, states that "photography was born of science. It is through science that we learn what the human senses cannot know, such as the electromagnetic spectrum that extends beyond the capacity of human sight." Calahan, who was first introduced to infrared photography during a magazine assignment on the University of South Carolina's scientific research of loggerhead sea turtles, displays a small portion of photographs he has taken by a digital camera altered to capture infrared and an infrared "light" source.
Nicole Diem, adjunct lecturer, says, "My passion is to create art and my love of art is to teach." A high school art educator for over 20 years, Diem was honored in 2018 as the outstanding arts educator for Carroll County by the Maryland Art Education Association. She has taught at the college level for three years and is also an instructor of ceramics for Common Ground on the Hill at McDaniel.
Chloe Irla, assistant professor and 2007 McDaniel alumna, shows pieces from her series "Home Work," a multidisciplinary design project that presents the overwhelming nature of the invisible labor of trying to maintain both professional and personal obligations during a global pandemic. "Since fall 2020, I've been creating work about my time teaching, working, and parenting from home," Irla says. "These projects include data visualizations of my time simultaneously working and parenting, knitted newspaper headlines about how working mothers were affected by the pandemic, and typographic wearables that express new terms that are now part of our daily vernacular, like 'languishing.'"
Steven Pearson, the Joan Develin Coley Chair in Creative Expression and the Arts, says, "The COVID-19 pandemic greatly impacted the course of my art making. I began a shift from abstract to representational and figurative work. These are my first investigations on this path as I explore formal and conceptual connections between my past and present." He says that while teaching remotely, he created instructional videos for his students demonstrating drawing and painting techniques. This led him to re-connect with the work he did in graduate school and the early part of his art career. His latest work is inspired by objects and people in his immediate surroundings.
Nicole Ringel, adjunct lecturer and 2016 McDaniel alumna, features work from Sense of Press, an independent publishing initiative, and Risograph printing studio, which she founded in Baltimore. With Sense of Press, she presents a zine-making pop up shop in which visitors can assemble, print, and disseminate their own 2-color zine while learning printmaking basics and the functionality of the press. While the Risograph printer, as Ringel notes, "is a stencil duplicator that operates in a similar fashion as the mimeograph. It creates fast, inexpensive copies using environmentally friendly and highly saturated soy-based inks."
