Visual and performing arts will team up Friday night at downtown Phoenix’s Icehouse, where students from ASU’s Art department will host their first ever collaborative exhibition featuring sculpture, music and dance.
The exhibition Apparatus Sculptoris was inspired by the constellation in the southern sky discovered by Nicolas Louis de Lacaille in the 18th century. Students from the schools of Art, Dance and Arts, and Media and Engineering in the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts will all be displaying their work.
“We were looking for a theme that would provoke imagination,” said Mary Neubauer, a sculpture professor at the School of Art.
“The Apparatus Sculptoris is a combination of a sculpture studio and a distant galaxy. It has a poetic feeling that embodies practicality and is a piece that is visionary.”
The ASU sculpture department organizes an off-campus exhibition each fall and spring semester. This year they invited other schools to join them at the Icehouse to put together an interdisciplinary exhibition that reflects ASU’s art programs as a whole, Neubauer said.
In addition to dance performances and sculpture installations, there will also be displays created by makers and inventors from Arts, Media and Engineering.
In building and designing the exhibit, various strategies such as illumination, fabrication, installation and new media were used to create an event that explores experimental art.
Almost the entire sculpture department is participating in the exhibit, including both graduate students and undergraduates. Sculptures at the exhibition will explore the intersection between the logical and the radical.
“In sculpting there is always a rational aspect. It is down-to-earth and practical, and within those grounds are experimental ideas,” Neubauer said.
She added that by having the exhibition at the Icehouse, they are given a great amount of raw and industrial space to work with.
“We really hope to reach out to a diverse audience, which is one reason we chose the Icehouse because it is such a unique space within an urban environment,” Neubauer said.
The event will be held Friday from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m.
Reach the reporter at newlin.tillotson@asu.edu
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