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Inspiration, Recycled

Photo by Alex Karamanova.
Photo by Alex Karamanova.

If you had to pick a color to repaint the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts building this year, green may be a good choice. That is, if the paint were locally bought and contained no materials harmful to the environment. Oh, and if you recycle the paintbrush, too, and dedicate the project to a social action group.

Many of the student exhibitions at the on-campus Harry Wood and Step galleries this spring have eco-friendly themes or otherwise raise awareness for social causes close to the artists’ hearts. This year’s first two group shows in Step Gallery seem to be proof: “Phosphorus, Food, and Our Future” and “Green Means Go.”

But these ASU students aren’t just hitching a ride on the sustainability gravy train. Some view the rise in artists dealing with these issues as simply a reflection of the times. Others see it as something larger, a community movement toward a more purposed and active role for the artist in a world that needs everyone to do their part.

“If I felt I could make a sculpture that could cure global warming, I would, but this is what I felt I could do,” says Becky Nahom, a 20-year-old undeclared art undergrad, who had this year’s first show in Step Gallery.

That exhibition focused less on her own work and more on creating a participatory space to raise awareness about LGBTQ issues, in particular gay teen suicides. To her, and perhaps other ASU art students, their work is more about raising awareness for social issues than making a pretty picture to hang on the wall.

“I personally wouldn’t be happy [just] painting a pot of flowers,” Nahom says. “I need that pot of flowers to mean something.”

For Cory Rogers, that pot of flowers looks more like a landscape of trash-piles blooming with futuristic mushrooms that biodegrade plastic.

Rogers, a photography and ceramics senior, says his thesis show “Discard By: 4/15/11” is inspired by a book called “The World Without Us,” which imagines how nature will cope with humankind’s inorganic creations after we’ve disappeared.

All the plastic Rogers used for the sculptures was recycled. The amount of bottles that he and friends have picked up to make these “gardens of plastic” overwhelm his Tempe backyard/patio/art studio.

Looking at all the reclaimed debris, he agrees that Herberger students are largely moving away from the idea of a “singular artist” focused on nothing but his or her own work and toward an idea of community and a new role as part of the larger human picture.

“There’s this realization [among ASU artists] that we do have a point of view and a place in society, and that the views we have are worthwhile,” he says. “We’re saying something that is important.”

Rogers says he wants his art to start a discussion about environmental and social issues: He’s exploring new ideas and concepts in college, and wants his audience to do the same.

“For me, art needs to mean something,” Rogers says. “It needs to provoke change, it needs to have a viewpoint, and I want my audience to leave with a better understanding of where they are in the world, and the consequences of their actions.”

Perhaps the university environment (pun intended) has partly cultivated this ethos in Herberger students.

“Here, you’re cross-pollinating your thoughts with other people from around the world,” says intermedia MFA candidate Jason Ripper. (Note: Even the Herberger students’ metaphors are eco-friendly.)

His show, called “Reflections,” opened at the end of February in Harry Wood and deals with his personal experience fighting through kidney dialysis treatments. But the artwork will also call attention to the drawbacks of dialysis and the inefficiencies of the organ donor system.

Echoing other Herberger students, Ripper says artists have a new awareness of social causes and a new sense of responsibility about how to contribute to solutions. A work of art meant to be hidden in a museum and “so conceptually out there that nobody [gets] it” misses the point, he contends.

“We’re not just artists anymore,” Ripper says. “I like to think I’m becoming less of an island, and more of a social contributor.”

All artists work for their own reasons — each valid — and it’s impossible to group everyone’s motivations together, says Lauren Strohacker, a third-year drawing MFA candidate. While some people go “the traditional artist route,” she says more and more artists are focusing on the social issues of their time and trying to influence them through their work.

Strohacker says fine arts can serve as a new way to communicate ideas about social issues and hopefully start different kinds of dialogue in the people who see it.

“I’m asking for some level of social interaction and participation from the audience,” she says. “I think that’s the nature of art right now. Whether it happens or not, I think that’s the hope — that we can help bring society toward something larger.”

Painting MFA candidate Ronna Nemitz says she’s noticed art themes trending toward contemporary social causes. While she recognizes and appreciates this choice in other artists’ work, Nemitz says it’s not for her.

To Nemitz, the links between art and life are less direct, so she focuses on emotions and materials and not today’s hot topics.

“I think [sustainability] is kind of the main entrée right now. It’s the main thing everybody’s doing,” she says. “I’m not saying artists shouldn’t tackle [environmental issues and causes], but there are a lot more direct avenues for that that aren’t me doing a sculpture about it.”

All produced art is filtered through its artist, she adds, and to treat certain themes just because they are “fashionable” and will elicit an immediate response can come off as “kind of arrogant, sometimes.”

“I think art happens, regardless of social causes,” Nemitz says. “I think it’s detrimental to say art must have an angle of social awareness. And I think it’s a burden on artists, to say your art has to have that angle of social awareness.“

However, Nemitz is quick to add that those she knows at Herberger who make socially aware art do so genuinely and for the right reasons.

Perhaps this artistic fascination with eco-topics and social causes isn’t out of trendiness, but because everyone from sculptors to scientists to sociologists to school bus drivers live in the same world and face the same challenges. “Sustainability” is just the one word both evocative and vague enough to encompass it all.

Also, as fibers MFA candidate Ashley Brooke Heuts says, “It’s the buzzword.”

While “sustainability is not a huge word in my studio,” Heuts says she admires what her peers at Herberger are doing. They are, she says, “really trying to make a social change — not that a social change will happen because of your art, but that your art might spark a change in ideas, and [that] your art might really challenge something.”

Reach the reporter at trabens@asu.edu.


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