October 13, 2022
Photo installation created by visual arts and architecture faculty members on display Oct. 15
The photo installation “Who Is To Say What Was There,” a collaboration between Zsuzsanna Nagy, adjunct faculty member of the School of Visual Arts, and James Kalsbeek, associate professor of architecture, will be on display Oct. 15 at the Workshop, located on 375 N. Pennsylvania Ave. in Centre Hall, from 7 to 9 p.m.
The images displayed were curated from Nagy's work over the past ten years. The individual photographs invite a “slow form of looking,” that Nagy hopes will expand the experience into a layered, multi-sensory journey.
In her photo practice, Nagy said she uses the camera to render the observable into an impressionistic and subjective reality where shape and color, for their own sake, are the driving compositional components. She emphasizes form over subject matter, atmosphere over information.
Nagy said her work explores notions of familiarity, belonging and transience, and the photographs are imbued with a sense of absence, calm and quiet. Upending conventions of photographic representation, she explains, speaks to an emotional and sensory experience of the world.
The images are accompanied by sound created by percussionist, multi-instrumentalist, composer and filmmaker Kevin Sims.
The installation was designed and built by James Kalsbeek whose decades-long engagement in projects of reclamation, reuse and demolition dovetail with his research interests in architectural hospice and the palliative care of buildings.