Grunwald showcases new art

Two exhibitions opened Friday at the Grunwald Gallery of Art. Animations and drawings covered one side of the gallery while movie posters, hand painted on flour sacks, decorated the other walls.

The exhibits, “Axe of Vengeance” and “Media Life,” opened with a reception. Glen Joffe, lender of the “Vengeance” posters, led a gallery talk prior to the reception. Both exhibits will be displayed until Sept. 15.

The two different openings brought in two different audiences, Grunwald Director Betsy Stirratt said.

She said the content of the exhibitions is both interesting and educationally significant to students.

“It’s not always what people expect,” Stirratt said. “It’s a diverse perspective on contemporary art.”

“Vengeance” presented Ghanaian film posters, hand painted with bright oil paints on flour sacks. The posters were used to promote and sell tickets to films shown in makeshift theaters in Ghana during the 1980s and ’90s.

This art form has since become obsolete, as audiences have shifted from theaters to home viewing.
 
The movie posters “are thick with local meaning and often resonate with the Ghanaian Pentecostal religion,” according to a press release.

Joffe, owner of Primitive art gallery in Chicago, said during the talk that Ghanaian artists used whatever material was available to them when creating the posters.

“Flour sacks, when opened up, made the perfect canvas,” Joffe said. “It wasn’t your original Hollywood lithograph poster.”

The posters are graphic and in your face, Joffe said. The artwork is primitive, and many included in the exhibit do not have the artist’s signature.

“Good artwork gets us to think, ask questions and set us on a path of wonder,” Joffe said. “Every one of these sucks me into some surreal world.”

The exhibit included a replica movie shack in the gallery, fashioned after the original viewing experience that Ghanaian citizens enjoyed. Visitors could view a selection of four feature-length films that play in the shack during the exhibit.

“Media Life,” the other exhibition, is a collaborative effort between IU telecommunications Associate Professor Mark Deuze and Dutch artist Miek van Dongen. The exhibit includes animations and drawings by van Dongen featured in Deuze’s book, also titled “Media Life.”

Deuze and van Dongen have been friends for more than 20 years. Though their careers took different paths, both were interested in the role media plays in society today
 
Van Dongen explored this interaction by creating and combining traditional pencil and paper drawings with digital animations. Deuze’s book “Media Life” includes 16 of van Dongen’s original works.

Deuze has taught courses about new media since the ’90s and used to teach students that the intimate relationship created between a person and media is problematic.

Deuze has since changed his approach to new media, supporting the mindset that media in society today is neither good nor bad.

“Perhaps media are to us as water is to fish,” Deuze said. ”We do not live with media but in media. This means media do not control or determine us, nor are we in control of our media.”