For Immediate Release:
Ringling College Remixes South Florida Museum
Installation and Performance Art Will Show South Florida Museum in New Light
(March 12, 2008)
In an historic partnership between the South Florida Museum and the Ringling College of Art and Design, students and faculty from the College will provide a new way of seeing the South Florida Museum and Bishop Planetarium from March 31 to April 11.
The show, entitled Cosmix, will feature a range of installations and sculpture from Ringling College faculty members, as well as an exhibit of student projects from classes in installation, performance and fabric arts. Much of the work will be made specifically for the South Florida Museum and is designed to provide a new context for seeing some of the museum’s permanent exhibits. In addition to the show of physical works, which will be on display for two weeks beginning March 22, the exhibit will conclude with an evening of performance art in the Bishop Planetarium, from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m., Saturday, April 5, 2008.
In addition to Ringling College faculty and students, the Cosmix event will feature two local performance artists, local legend of ambient music, composer/musician Rik Tweed and emerging multi-disciplinary theater artist, Anna DeMers. During the 1980s Tweed was the leading figure in the local ambient music scene performing in local art events, concerts, and happenings while working from an early “warehome” studio which became a salon for local bohemian culture among Sarasota’s clusters of industrial metal buildings.
Anna DeMers, a recent graduate from Bayshore High School and Rollins College, is an emerging performance artist deeply involved in the experimental theater scene in Orlando. This Spring she is completing her MFA from the graduate school at Sarah Lawrence in New York City. DeMers, a choreographer, playwright and dancer is co-founder of the Terpsichore Collective and is associated with the Empty Spaces Theatre Company in Orlando.
Light artist Wendy Wischer from Miami, who is gaining a national reputation as an important new media artist, is currently a visiting artist at the Ringling College of Art and Design. She will have several contributions to the exhibit including her work, Static, a sculpture made from a satellite dish encrusted with Swarovski crystals. The piece is both art object and art projector providing an experience that shifts with changes in light and perspective. Wischer will contribute both physical installation work and media work for the planetarium event. Wischer creates conceptually based work in a variety of media ranging from photography to sculptural objects, to site-specific installations and public works. Much of her work is based on blurring the separation between the intrinsic history of working with nature and the cutting edge of “New Media”. She is the recipient of the Pollock-Krasner grant, the South Florida Consortium Grant, the Individual Artist Fellowship and the Artist Enhancement Grant from the State of Florida, the New Forms Grant from the Miami-Dade Division of Cultural Affairs.
Wischer is currently teaching a class in installation art at Ringling College and has led her students through the process of making specific pieces for different areas and environments of the South Florida Museum. These works will be deployed throughout the museum sometimes in unused or common spaces within the museum, at other times in direct interaction with museum exhibits. The emphasis will be on demonstrating how art artists can help us see in a new way the museum and its contents.
Among the other faculty members of the Ringling College of Art and Design participating in the event are David Steiling, Mark Anderson, Patrick Lindhardt, John Mack, Shawn Pettersen, Mario Naves, Robert Farber, Wendy Dickinson, Peter Rampson, Tim Rumage, Dee Hood, Sheryl Haler, Lisa French and Alison Watkins.
The South Florida Museum, which houses a museum of natural and cultural history, the Bishop Planetarium and the Parker Manatee Aquarium, presents a comprehensive view of our scientific and cultural knowledge of Florida, the world and our universe. The Cosmix exhibition is an artistic re-interpretation of these themes built around the importance of the cardinal directions in orienting oneself in all relationships in both physical and virtual space. The cardinal directions celebrated by this project are East, South, West, North, Up, Down, and Inward.
About Ringling College of Art and Design
For more than 76 years, Ringling College of Art and Design has cultivated the creative spirit in art and design students from around the globe … changing the way the world thinks about art and design. Founded in 1931 by noted art collector, real estate magnate, and circus impresario John Ringling, the private, not-for-profit fully accredited college offers the Bachelor of Fine Arts degree [BFA] in 13 disciplines: Advertising Design, Broadcast Design/Motion Graphics (fall 2009), Computer Animation, Digital Film, Game Art & Design, Fine Arts, Graphic & Interactive Communication, Illustration, Interior Design, Painting, Printmaking, Photography & Digital Imaging, and Sculpture. A Bachelor of Arts [BA] is offered in the Business of Art & Design. The picturesque 41-acre campus today includes more than 100 buildings, and enrolls 1,s00 students from 43 states and 31 countries – more than half of whom reside on the pedestrian-friendly residential campus. Its 140 faculty members are all professional artists, designers, and scholars who actively pursue their own work outside the classroom.
Contacts
South Florida Museum:
Jeff Rodgers,
Director of Education/Director, Bishop Planetarium
941-746-4131 ext. 22 or jrodgers@southfloridamuseum.org
Suzanne White, Curator of Exhibits
941-746-4131 ext 37 or swhite@southfloridamuseum.
or
Ringling College:
Christine Meeker Lange,
Special Assistant to the President for Media & Community Relations
office: 941.359.7594, mobile: 941.302.2769 or clange@ringling.edu
David Steiling, , Ph.D.
Professor of Literature and Liberal Arts
(941) 358-8384 or dsteilin@ringling.edu