IRIS login | Reed College home Volume 92, No. 1: March 2013
Professor, author, translator, traveler, collector, mentor, and—yes, artist. Welcome to the protean career of Lena Lenček, pictured here at home with a series of watercolors she painted on a sabbatical visit to Tuscany. Photo by Leah Nash
Recent paintings by Professor Lena Lenček [Russian 1977–] appear in Geochromes: The Spirit of Place in Line and Color, showing through June 2013 in the Vollum College Center Gallery. Stephanie Snyder ’91, director of the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, is curator.
The exhibition features works that Professor Lenček created during 2011–13 in some of the world’s most magical environments, including Tuscany, Puglia, the U.S. Southwest, Baja California, and the Oregon coast. Lenček states: “I chose a cloistered profession, but I’ve lived my life on the move, anxious to see as much as my eyes will hold, and in this gluttonous curiosity, pen and paper have been my accomplices. I sketch on the road, the air, and the sea because only when I look with my pen and brush do I catch and fix the fleeting conjunction between the timeless geography of land and my moment and the memories to come.”
Continue reading Lena's Paintings on Display
On a clear Southern California night, Tyler Nordgren '91 stepped outside to take a last look at Mars through his home telescope before stepping inside to watch the landing of the Curiosity rover on NASA TV.
By this time, Curiosity was already slamming into the Martian atmosphere at more than 13,000 miles per hour. After four minutes of aerobraking, the largest supersonic parachute ever deployed off the planet Earth slowed the rover to 220 miles per hour. Then the lander cut away from the chute, firing retro-rockets and searching for a good landing spot. Twenty-five feet above the Martian surface, the lander lowered the rover to the ground and fired explosives that cut the tethers that held them together.
Continue reading Reedie Designs Sundial for Mars Rover
Gary Michael, Powell Butte, pastel
Reed is hosting a cool show of art inspired by Johnson Creek and its tributary, Crystal Springs, which issues forth from the Canyon.
Check out the art on display in Vollum Lounge until October 12, 2012.
Continue reading Johnson Creek Art Show
"Today's dissonance in music and painting is merely the consonance of tomorrow," wrote Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky in a 1913 letter to Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg. At the dawn of the 20th century, artists like Kandinsky and Schoenberg broke free from the norms of their medium--and subsequently, their era--by creating music and art that was atonal and abstract. But one year later, the entire movement was uprooted, and the daring avant-garde was replaced by the traditionalism of yesteryear.
What explains this artistic retreat? The Great War, according to author and musicologist Olivia Mattis, who visited campus Saturday as part of ROMP (Reediana Omnibus Musica Philosopha), Reed's annual symposium on music and the liberal arts. "The high modernism of the pre-World War I avant-garde was displaced" after the war, said Mattis. "War called for a return to traditional values."
Continue reading Synaesthesia and the Great War
RAW is in the air. Since Wednesday morning, projects have been cropping up throughout campus, with concentric circles of laundry rising from the front lawn, surreal living rooms materializing in Commons, and rolling pallets of grass drifting around the ground floor of Eliot.
Today, a grubby crew of artists in sweatshirts and Carhartts could be seen industriously striding around Eliot Circle, stacking and welding several tons of scrap metal into a labyrinthine tower. The piece, entitled Assembly of Freight, is the brainchild of sculptor and installation artist Ben Wolf.
Continue reading Shipwreck in Eliot Circle