What: Annual CVAD Faculty and Staff Exhibition, featuring a variety of media created by staff and faculty in the College of Visual Arts and Design at the University of North Texas
When: Nov. 14 (Monday) – Jan. 12 (Thursday) at UNT on the Square and Nov. 15 (Tuesday) – Dec. 3 (Saturday) at UNT Art Gallery. Opening reception is from 5 to 8 p.m. Nov. 17 (Thursday) at both venues.
Where: UNT on the Square, 109 N. Elm St., and UNT Art Gallery, 1201 W. Mulberry St., both in Denton
Hours: UNT on the Square: 9 a.m. - noon and 1 - 5 p.m. Monday - Friday, with extended hours until 8 p.m. on Thursdays and Fridays and 11 a.m. - 3 p.m. Saturdays; UNT Art Gallery: noon - 5 p.m. Tuesdays, Fridays and Saturdays and 9:30 a.m. – 8 p.m. Wednesdays and Thursdays.
Cost: Free
DENTON (UNT), Texas - The annual College of Visual Arts and Design Faculty and Staff Exhibition will give teachers at the University of North Texas an opportunity to experiment – from unique jewelry to different media.
The exhibition will take place Nov. 14 (Monday) – Jan. 12 (Thursday) at UNT on the Square and Nov. 15 (Tuesday) – Dec. 3 (Saturday) at UNT Art Gallery. Opening reception is from 5 to 8 p.m. Nov. 17 (Thursday) at both venues.
Ana M. Lopez, associate professor and program coordinator of metals and jewelry, will show a broach inspired by an attic turbine vent that fastens to a person’s shoulder as though the shoulder were the rooftop. The vent spins, too. This piece was inspired by a house in her Fort Worth neighborhood.
“I enjoy looking at everyday objects and imagining them on the body,” she said.
Lopez was first influenced to create such jewelry when she visited Europe in 2012 and saw objects – such as fire hydrants – that didn’t look like the generic American version. She decided to create her own version.
“They became jewelry and souvenirs of those places,” she said.
Zahid Islam, assistant professor of interior design, also decided to do something different by switching media. Islam is an architect who specializes in sustainability and digital design process, but is showing a painting of the Chrysler Building in New York City in the moonlight based on a photograph a friend took several years ago.
He believes any media by itself is not sufficient enough to properly express the complex thought of a designer. Besides developing virtual reality, 3D models, architectural rendering and animation he emphasizes equally on various manual modalities.
“I’m basically experimenting and exploring,” he said.
He chose to enter it in the show after receiving an email about it.
“Oh, why not share with my colleagues and see what other people are doing?” he said. “My colleagues don’t know that I paint alongside computer aided designing.”
Students also like to see what their teachers are doing, which is why Marian O’Rourke-Kaplan, associate professor and graduate coordinator of fashion design, enjoys participating in the show. She submitted Crossing the Line, which uses a technique in which spaghetti-like glass are aligned together and then taken into the kiln. There they form into a solid sheet of glass, and the sheet is then cut into ½” strips. The strips are reassembled to create interesting patterns and it is fired again to fuse the pieces together.
O’Rourke-Kaplan took up glass fusing this summer after discovering classes at the Dallas Craft Guild – twenty years after she first took up stained glass.
“It’s intriguing to me,” she said. “You create a design composition and you put it into the kiln and it becomes one piece of glass. It’s very fun.”