October 15, 2009
Jacob Lawrence Gallery presents work by Garvens
The Jacob Lawrence Gallery presents Devices: Works by Associate Professor Ellen Garvens now through Oct. 31 in the gallery.
In Devices, Associate Professor of Photography Ellen Garvens exhibits her constructions, photographs, and drawings — which are of fragments of bodies and their surrogates — as a reflection on the experience of touch, balance, and memory.
Included in this show are several series of interrelated works by Garvens. One series of sculptures combine hand tools and photographs to create a hybrid image/object. In these works anthropomorphic aspects of small hand tools are brought to bear on photographs of the human form.
Extending her interest in tools and the body, Garvens has also photographed the process of making prosthetics both in the U.S. and in clinics and labs in Southeast Asia. These images isolate devices from their surroundings at various stages of completion, and challenge our perceptions of them.
Most recently, she has a series of drawings and black and white photographs inspired by what she has witnessed. Drawn from casts of her own hands and feet, as well as of her family, she combines them with domestic artifacts. The sculptures, photographs and drawings, balance precariously between recognition and elusiveness.
The Jacob Lawrence Gallery is free and open to the public Wednesday through Saturday, noon to 4 p.m. The gallery is located on the first floor of the School of Art Building.
