The Art of Curating

If a cursory look can titillate a visitor's interest, ultimately an exhibition's content makes the visit memorable. Hive Mind at Loyola University's Diboll Gallery is a show that offers both: a strong visual impression and a rich compelling display. Curated through the collaborative effort of twenty three undergraduate students, it assembles the works of fifteen graduate artists, and includes paintings, photographs, sculptures, videos and small installations.
The white space on the top floor of the building, above the library, is bathing in natural light on one side and artificial light on the other. Its center is surrounded by a sort of semi-circle walkway. Rendere: Pouring myself out to render...life, 2013, a large piece from Luba Zygarewicz, faces the entrance, floating in the air. The fragile construction made of bee wax with a single word "life" painted in red on it, projects a web-like shadow on the panel behind it. Heaps of colored used tea, remnants from the artist's consumption, are lined up below it. Her second piece found nearby is eye-catching as well. A Thousand Wishes, 2017, is a dress made of used teabags, hanging from the ceiling to the floor, spreading like a train. Starting on the left, a wall text describes the exhibition and provides a list of the artists' and curators' names. Smaller framed works like photographs, prints, watercolors, needlepoint, are hung on the columns supporting the structure and are usually grouped by artists. Sculptures on pedestals fill empty areas, allowing a view on all sides. Peter Barnitz is well represented with five of his unique compositions scattered from the entrance to the back. Three of Esther Murphy's colorful photographs made in 2017, inspired by her year long stay in China, are next to each other, across one of Barnitz's monochrome black work, while a fourth is found further amid works from Michel Varisco and Jenna Knoblach. Lighter, humorous prints from Dianna Sanchez are spread throughout the show. The selected pieces reflect the artists' practices, sometimes with smaller works for Carlie Trosclair, due to the constraints imposed by the space.
The artists are known, some works were previously displayed in other venues, Contemporary Art Center, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, galleries,..., or are available to look at on the web.
The exhibition provides a way to rediscover them in a different context, through the fresh eyes and the hive mind of undergraduate students.

photographs by the author:
Luba Zygarewicz "A Thousand Wishes", 2017
Peter Barnitz "Amid the Strikes" (detail), 2016
Erica Larkin Gaudet "Reclining Figure Maquette", 2018

Time and Teabags

The Emerge Gallery, a small oval space at the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans is reserved for site specific installations and the latest, A Thousand Threads is a creation from the conceptual artist Luba Zygarewicz.
The threads carefully stretched from the second floor to the ground create a whirling web underlined in the background by the colored teabags falling along the walls like dry flowers. A closer look reveals a date on each teabag, a sort of melancholic calendar. The daily breaks for tea engender thoughts about time, rituals to control the uncontrollable of life, permanence. The teabags hang from thin threads, a reminder of the frailty of life and the uneven lengths of the threads, a measure of the daily memories' weight. Teatime is repetitive but the different colors, shapes (and most likely flavors) of the teabags represent a particular day. Proust who wrote In Search of Lost Time found his lost memories in the perfume of the madeleines, Zygarewicz used teabags to represent time creating, a poetic installation, built days after days after days...

photographs by the author:
"A Thousand Threads" a site specific installation by Luba Zygarewicz at the Contemporary Art Center
view from the first floor, 
detail
view from the second floor