Art by college faculty displayed at Stark galleries April 2 – May 31

The artistic talents of 29 current and former Texas A&M College of Architecture faculty members were showcased April 2 – May 31, 2015 when [J. Wayne Stark Galleries] (http://uart.tamu.edu/stark) hosted the 21st Faculty Art Biennial at the Memorial Student Center.

A longstanding Coillege of Architecture tradition, the Faculty Art Biennial has taken place every other year since its inception in 1973, with the exception of 2011, when the MSC was closed for renovations.

An opening reception featured music by Langford Hotel, a jazz band led by Mark Clayton, professor of architecture, and featuring other faculty and former students.

“This year's exhibit highlighted the amazing breadth of talent in the college,” said Howard Eilers, an associate professor of visualization and coordinator of the 2015 show. “There were photographs, multimedia installations, steel sculptures, paintings, sketches, and even 3-D printed flexible textile structures.”

More specific examples of the show's 2015 lineup included furniture created in an Arts & Crafts/Shaker style by Eric Bardenhagen, assistant professor of landscape architecture, photos of a 950-foot sustainable residence designed by Gerald Maffei, architecture professor emeritus, and an interactive installation resembling a roulette wheel that explores visual aesthetics’ effects on auditory perception, by Sherman Finch, assistant professor of visualization.

Three retired faculty members, Karen Hillier, professor emerita of visualization, Mary Saslow, a longtime senior visualization lecturer, and David Woodcock, professor emeritus of architecture, also displayed their work at the exhibit.

This year’s faculty biennial will also mark the first time Hillier and her son, Sam Woodfin, a visualization lecturer, will have work displayed in the same exhibit.

Faculty members scheduled to exhibit their work are:

• Koichiro Aitani , associate professor of architecture, who photographed a street festival in Tokushima, Japan as part of a project researching the festival’s effect on the city’s urban regeneration;
• Eric Bardenhagen , assistant professor of landscape architecture, who designs and crafts furniture that blends the Shaker and Arts & Crafts styles;
• Anatol Bologan , visualization lecturer, whose photographs highlight multilayered aspects of urban landscapes where architectural space can serve as a stage design or backdrop to the theatricality of the mundane;
• Dick Davison , professor of visualization, who said “making art tends to invite the question, ‘what is the meaning of life?’”;
• Howard Eilers , associate professor of visualization, who photographed ski slopes in Utah;
• Marcel Erminy , senior architecture lecturer;
• Sherman Finch , assistant professor of visualization, whose installations investigate audio mechanics by creating a dialogue between visual aesthetics, embodied interaction, and the resulting effects on auditory perception;
• Weiling He , associate professor of architecture;
• Karen Hillier , professor emeritus of visualization, whose images recall images of ordinary objects she saw during childhood visits to her grandparents’ home;
• Felice House , assistant professor of visualization, who questions the male hero stereotypes in classic Western films in a series of paintings;
• Chang-Shan Huang , associate professor of landscape architecture, who sketches and paints in an effort to observe and better understand places;
• Bill Jenks , assistant visualization department head;
• Morgan Jenks , visualization lecturer, whose drawings of simple lines and patterns explore transitional states;
• Negar Kalantar , assistant professor of architecture, and Alireza Borhani , architecture lecturer, whose 3-D printed flexible textile structures explore how motion can be suggested, depicted or physically incorporated in a building envelope;
• Dmitri Koustov , a visualization lecturer who creates sculptures and paintings that feature mixtures of forms and colors;
• Carol LaFayette , professor of visualization, whose monofilament installation reflects on how an orb spider makes its web;
• Gerald Maffei , professor emeritus of architecture, designed a 950 square-foot residence using sustainable materials and strategies;
• John Nichols , associate professor, department of construction science;
• Mike O’Brien , professor of architecture; digitially produced images, inspired by West Texas scenes, printed on canvas;
• Marcus Pasing , adjunct professor of visualization;
• Russell Reid , assistant professor of the practice of landscape architecture and visualization, whose paintings merge his architectural and graphic arts backgrounds;
• Judith Reitz , adjunct associate professor of visualization, who helped create an installation that recalls the ceiling ornamentation in a historic building in Bern, Switzerland;
• Julie Rogers , senior lecturer of architecture;
• Mary Saslow , a former visualization lecturer, who, inspired by the record-breaking heat and fires of 2011, created a series of images with Photoshop brushes;
• Krista Steinke , visualization lecturer, whose photographs reveal tenuous moments that hover between fragility and transformation while capturing the myriad stages of life and death;
• Glen Vigus , lecturer and senior visualization production specialist, whose portrait photographs explore the emotional facades people present to the world;
• David Woodcock , professor emeritus of architecture, who created a series of drawings during a recent visit to Massachusetts, and
• Sam Woodfin , lecturer, Department of Architecture.