Augsburg College Art Galleries

This week I went to the Augsburg College campus. This is not a unique place to find an art gallery, but it was a first for me. I wasn't sure what it would be like to walk around on the campus and try to find these small galleries, but it wasn't to bad at all. On this trip I needed to find two different galleries, and both were in very public areas. I had no trouble at all finding them.

The first gallery that I looked at was called Pixel and Pen. This was in the Christian Art Center and was a combination of many different artists. This exhibit focused on works of art using manipulated traditional media, computer rendered media and analog art. Most of these works of art looked very obviously digital to me, but a few of them looked like they could be an oil painting on canvas. The detail was so fine that you could not see any of the pixels that usually make up a digital photo or work of art. I was very impressed by this.

Two works in Pixel and Pen caught my eye more than the others. The first is called Barak Obama and is by James O'Brien. This is a screen print and looks a lot like the works of art that Picasso made. It looked similar in the lines and angles in the face. Also the use of colors looked similar to a Picasso painting. Blue next to brown and no blending in between them. It was an interesting piece and made Barak Obama look powerful and yet gentle.

The next piece I saw that I really liked was called Lake by Mick Wiggins and was a digital print. This was an image of a woman standing near a lake. Just near her there is a fire burning. Like the Barak Obama print that I really liked, Lake was very detailed. It really didn't look like a digital work of art at all. It looked more like a painting on canvas. I think it is really neat what can be done with computer images now. The clarity is amazing to the point that you don't realize it's not a real image.

The second gallery I needed to visit at Augsburg was called Lucia Hwang: Whats Up. This was in the Gage Family Art Gallery in the Oren Gateway Center. This was an interesting exhibit that was a four part instillation. It was all by one artist, Lucia Hwang, and she was trying to express her view of love, hate, pride and humility. What she did was interesting as she took common items and put a twist on them with a designer print. She used a trash barrel, rolls of toilet paper, egg cartons, and an image of a body on the floor. The print that she made looks like what you would see on a designer hand bag. It seems that she is trying to portray how silly we are about needing to only buy things that have a designer logo of some sort on them. I really liked this exhibit for that reason. It brings to light just how much meaning we put into things that probably don't mean much at all.

I liked these two galleries that I visited. They are both small, but hold exhibits that have a big message. They are both assessable to many people but mostly the college students who are on campus each day. It's a great thing that they are able to see good art on a daily basis.