Night Gallery Visit

Last night, I visited ASU's Night Gallery at Tempe Marketplace along with some friends. It was the opening for "Twilight," a show featuring the sculptures of Benjamin Phillips as well as the opening for Elise Deringer's show "One Follows Another." Both Benjamin and Elise are grad students at ASU so I had seen some of their work before (I helped take down Elise's MFA thesis exhibit in my Gallery Exhibitions class) but I was curious to see what this show would include.

To say the least, Benjamin's work is weird, and at least slightly disturbing. But I love it. To begin with, I really enjoy art that includes the human figure, which is why I include people in many of my own pieces. However, he takes it to a whole new creepy level in the way he includes mismatched body parts in his sculptures. The exhibit also includes several of his drawings, which seemed like studies for the actual figures themselves. Overall, his show really interested me and made me feel. Maybe it is a little too full of a shock factor, but I would rather look at art that is too creepy rather than too boring or safe.

Here's his sculpture Obsessive Man, one of the pieces at the gallery. I found this image on his website, www.benjaminphillips.info. If you would like to see more awesome, disturbing pieces, I definitely recommend taking a look at the site, or visiting the Night Gallery yourself.

Elise's portion of the gallery contained many of the same pieces that I saw exhibited for her thesis in the Harry Wood Gallery at ASU. She uses silk, stones, and sand in many of her works, which references the idea of how delicate silk is, yet how strong it can be. The artwork that was displayed included huge panels of died and sewn silk, small cups of silk holding sand, rocks, and spices, and sewn silk envelopes. My favorite works from the show were fourteen framed pieces of died silk with rocks sewn inside, called Inaccessible Pockets. These were small and simple, yet eye catching and intriguing.

Here's a photo from when these pieces were exhibited at the Harry Wood. The set up is slightly different at the current Night Gallery show. I found this image from Elise's website, www.elisederingerwendte.com.

Overall, I found these current displays at the Night Gallery to be really interesting and intriguing. Both of these shows will be displayed until October 30. The Night Gallery is open from 6-9pm on Tuesday through Sunday. You can find out a little more about this exhibition space here on the ASU Herberger website.