Plastic Poetics
January 18 – February 22, 2008

Opening reception: Jan 18, 5-8 p.m.

Regina Gouger Miller Gallery
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

www.cmu.edu/millergallery



Since January 2000, the Miller Gallery has sought to support the creation, growth, and understanding of contemporary art through exhibitions, projects, events and publications. A non-collecting facility located in the Purnell Center for the Arts on the main campus of Carnegie Mellon, the Gallery is named for Regina Gouger Miller, alumna of the School of Art, avid art collector, and generous principal donor. The 9,000 square foot space functions less as a showroom for art, than one for experimentation, examination, discovery and discussion. The gallery aspires to engage diverse audiences, as well as to stimulate, provoke and encourage contemplation of the visual arts of our times.


Gallery Phone: 412 268 3618
Fax: 412 268 4746

Gallery Hours:
Tuesday–Sunday 11:30am-5:00pm

Regina Gouger Miller Gallery

Plastic Poetics Exhibit at Carnegie Mellon’s Miller Gallery Brings
Sculptures and Installations from Four Artists
            PITTSBURGH—Plastic Poetics, a new exhibit featuring artists Ian Finch, Maya Schindler, Sarah Wood and Colin Zaug, opens at Carnegie Mellon University’s Regina Gouger Miller Gallery with a reception from 5 to 8 p.m. on Jan. 18 and runs until Feb. 22. Cara Erskine, exhibitions coordinator for the Regina Gouger Miller Gallery, is curating this exhibition.
            “The artists reconfigure raw, industrial materials to create art that is both of the tactile world and beyond it, sharing a strange familiarity of language, shadows, and artificial landscapes,” Erskine said.
            Pittsburgher Finch received degrees in book publishing and poetry from Geneva and Emerson colleges and the University of Pittsburgh. He studied poetry and experimental book arts in New Zealand as a U.S. Fulbright scholar. He contributes unconventional Venn diagrams drawn directly on the Miller Gallery walls that visually represent his poetry. Finch’s interconnected diagrams are on all three gallery floors. Erskine said Finch’s Venn diagram poems were written in response to the artists’ work.
            Wood, who lives and works in Brooklyn, contributes sculptures that are doubles or shadows of everyday objects like house plants. All of Wood’s sculptures are made of black, synthetic materials such as rubber, vinyl and plastic that lend an apocalyptic quality to the doubles. “I’m disrupting the order of events,” Wood writes in her statement. “At times it’s a process of separation — disconnect a window from it’s shadow, and an ordinary houseplant becomes a silhouette. In other instances it’s cumulative, the working together of conflicting elements, an unfamiliar connection.”
Los Angeles artist Schindler’s sculptures consist of letters that have been carved into shapes and painted and then layered on top of each other. The words are given new and different meaning through the physical expression of the sculpture. From the artist statement, her work “suggests that understanding is always fully in doubt, but it still understands. I try to guide you into this revelation with humor, strangeness and a dose of the familiar.”
            Zaug is represented by an inflatable landscape that was constructed at the Miller Gallery. Visitors can enter Zaug’s installation and view the gallery from within the world Zaug has created. Zaug attended the Rhode Island School of Design and the University of Victoria. His work has been exhibited across the United States and in Canada.
            Plastic Poetics is Erskine’s first curatorial project. Recent exhibitions of her own work include a solo exhibition at Tunnel Gallery, Pittsburgh, PA and in group shows at Front Room Gallery, Cleveland, OH, and Jenny Jaskey Gallery, Philadelphia, PA.
            Images of the artists’ work are online at http://millergallery.cfa.cmu.edu/exhibitions/.
For more information, visit http://millergallery.cfa.cmu.edu/. The gallery, which is located in the Purnell Center for the Arts, is open Tuesday through Sunday from 11:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is free.