around
campus
Exhibition: “Beauty Not Wasted”
T
his March, the Angie Newman Johnson Gallery in the Ainslie Arts Center hosted “Beauty Not Wasted,” a “green” art exhibition created collaboratively by faculty members David Douglas and Frank Phillips and EHS students Katie Chapman ’09, Stewart Cory ’10, Phil Dujardin ’09, and Baobao Zhang ’09. Inspired by this winter’s Headmaster’s Challenge to reduce campus energy consumption (see page 8), the Arts Department issued its own challenge: these students and teachers would take recyclable materials – glass, paper, cardboard, and plastic – and reconfigure them into works of art, finding the beauty in products that would otherwise be considered waste. “Process and collaboration were integral components to this project,” wrote Phillips in his curator’s essay. “These materials are not usual art supplies… irregular and oftentimes limiting in their current states. So, all compositions became pieces that required experimentation, revision, contemplation, correction, discussion, alteration, evaluation, and adjustment before reaching any sort of resolution. The sideby-side works literally grew into one another, and represent the overall synergy among the artists and artwork.” While the pieces were produced individually, each references the natural world – a common thread Phillips said emerged independently as the artists worked on their creations. “Whether a forest of cardboard trees, a cascade of glass bottles, a tangle of plastic ivy, paper birds taken to flight, or the silhouettes of a boy and a girl, these things simply and elegantly describe the beauty around us,” Phillips wrote.
Baobao Zhang ’09 used magazine pages to craft the birds in her piece,“Spiral Birds.”
Some of the paper birds found their way to perches around the gallery, including the branches of “Cardboard Trees,” constructed by Katie Chapman ’09.
In the spirit of environmental stewardship, all of the supplies used will be recycled after the exhibition ends. n “Boy and Girl,” by Phil Dujardin ’09 and Frank Phillips, outlines the silhouettes of students Chip Grossman ’11 (left) and Ruffin Mitchener ’11 in recyclable plastic.
EHS The Magazine of Episcopal High School
5