Sculptor Anna Campbell opens Lawrence University’s Wriston Art Center Galleries’ latest exhibition with a discussion of her show “Apparatus for a Dream Sequence” Thursday, March 29 at 6 p.m. A reception follows Campbell’s remarks. Both are free and open to the public. The new exhibition runs through May 6.
An associate professor of art and design at Grand Valley State University, Campbell employs props, scaffold and trusswork in her work to explore social constructions, lived experience, and the labor of constructing a utopian future. Through brilliantly varnished marquetry and faceted, gilded cordial glasses, she gestures toward a luxurious and comfortable social space. Her show’s title refers to the diverse terms that generations of LGBT and other marginalized people have used to mark the labor of making and naming home.
“Campbell’s installations are both sensorially enticing and intentionally subversive,” said Beth Zinsli, director and curator of the Wriston Art Center Galleries. “They’re designed to make the viewer think carefully about language, names, pleasure, labor, comfort and to question their assumptions about those ideas.”
The exhibition “Art of the Book” features works from Lawrence’s own Seeley G. Mudd Library’s Art of the Book collection. Started in 2011, the collection features 63 titles, with several new ones added year year. Among the numerous artists included in the exhibition is Lawrence Associate Professor of Art Benjamin Rinehart and his pop-up book “Team Ramey.”
Painter Zina Mussmann, a faculty member at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design whose work has been exhibited regionally and nationally, presents “Unto Itself: New work by Zina Mussmann.” Referring to the ways micro and macroscopic scientific images awake a new type of existential anxiety, “Unto Itself” features more than two dozen drawings, including watercolor, gouache, ink and graphite on white paper, from Mussmann’s 2016 series “Automata.”
According to Mussman, “science has revealed systems that are autopoetic, existing within us on the tiniest of scales and all around us in seemingly infinite space and time. The drawings in this series purposefully reveal and conceal the structure of these systems; they are not faithful representations, rather they beg the question of what is still unseen. What is still hidden from us in the ether? And how will that continue to challenge human primacy?”
The Wriston Art Center is open Tuesday-Friday 10 a.m. – 4 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday noon – 4 p.m.; closed Mondays. Free and open to the public.
About Lawrence University
Founded in 1847, Lawrence University uniquely integrates a college of liberal arts and sciences with a nationally recognized conservatory of music, both devoted exclusively to undergraduate education. It was selected for inclusion in the book “Colleges That Change Lives: 40 Schools That Will Change the Way You Think About College.” Engaged learning, the development of multiple interests and community outreach are central to the Lawrence experience. Lawrence draws its 1,500 students from nearly every state and more than 50 countries.
