New faculty members at Reed

Bottom Row, Left To Right:
Michael Childress, Assistant Professor Of Biology; Leslie Butler, Visiting Assistant Professor Of History; Laurie Zaring, Visiting Assistant Professor Of Linguistics; Scott Smith, Visiting Assistant Professor Of History And Humanities; Marcus Verhagen, Assistant Professor Of Art History And Humanities; And Jan Mieszkowski, Assistant Professor Of German And Humanities. Top Row, Left To Right: Kenneth Strothkamp, Visiting Associate Professor Of Chemistry; Katharine Jenckes '92, Visiting Assistant Professor Of Spanish; Joel Sweek, Visiting Assistant Professor Of Religion; Derek Schilling, Assistant Professor Of French And Humanities; Katja Garloff, Assistant Professor Of German And Humanities; Justin Weir, Visiting Professor Of Russian And Humanities; And Stepan Simek, Visiting Professor Of Theatre. Not Pictured: Rick Hillis, Visiting Assistant Professor Of English (Creative Writing).

Ruben speaks at conference

Laurens Ruben, Kenan Professor of Biology Emeritus, was invited to lecture at the Seventh Congress of the International Society of Developmental and Comparative Immunology this summer at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. Ruben spoke on his studies on cancer resistance in amphibia as part of a program on "Novel Models of Human Disease." Ruben is past president of the society; the Fifth Congress of the group was hosted by Reed College in 1991.

Ondrizek wins top prize at the Portland Art Museum's Oregon Biennial

Her installation, Libri, features in Cooley Gallery
Geraldine Ondrizek, assistant professor of art, was the first-prize winner at the Portland Art Museum's Oregon Biennial. Parts of her 1994-95 installation, Collector's Chamber, were recreated for the Biennial. Ondrizek won a curator's prize of $1,000, which was presented at the opening night of the museum exhibition.

Ondrizek's installation, Libri, was on display at the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery this fall. Libri, a play on the Latin word for planks of wood, takes as its subjects plant materials, tree trunks, botanical systems of classification, and the quirky data of memory.

Ondrizek, a member of Reed's studio art faculty since 1994, has exhibited her work nationally--at the Mattress Factory, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; at the Matrix Gallery, Sacramento; and at the Anderson Ranch Art Center, Colorado--and in the Northwest at Marylhurst College and the Maryhill Museum. Her work has also been exhibited abroad, most recently at the Frauenkirche in Munich.

Ondrizek writes of her work: "It is a library of organic forms and their ghost images. The organizational system I have adopted refers back to a herbarium in which organic material has traditionally been catalogued . . . . renderings were generated from rubbings of the living forms."

Many of the pieces, which combine actual botanical materials with drawing and other markings, are sandwiched between pieces of glass or Plexiglas, like the glass slides and cover slips used to preserve biological specimens. These are densely packed into a small room constructed within the exhibition, evoking a Renaissance collector's chamber.

Elsewhere in the installation, a sliced tree, cast skins of the tree trunk, and rubbings compound memory with the elusive sensuality of touch. As Patricia Failing has written in her catalogue essay for the exhibition: "Ondrizek tries to suspend the process of decay, an incremental form of loss like forgetting, its psychic twin. In the end, her kunstkammer is really a collection of disappearances."



Next Page
Next Page