Walking into the venue felt like walking into a horror movie, but in actuality it was an art exhibit. Meiley-Swallow had been transformed into what seemed like a museum.
“Anatomy of the Vessel,” an art exhibit by senior Lauren Denler, has been on display for the month of April and features various forms of art: from ceramics, to sculptures created in wood and porcelain, and even real food.
The whole exhibit is filled with ceramics of body parts, bones, and in the center, a huge canvas of a wax like substance filled with hair and other hard-to-place items. The whole exhibit will make you question how sanitary the work is and the sanity of the artist.
A table set for two is featured in the exhibit. The piece is called “Organs” and features a whole set of handmade ceramic dishes complete with plates, mugs, bowls, and a tea kettle.
What makes this a unique piece is that all of the dishes resemble organs. All the plates have veins painted on them or have arteries on the side of them.
The mugs carry the same theme the veins painted on the side and the artery being used as the mug’s handle. The star of the table is by far the the kettle which accurately resembles the human heart. The eeriness of the whole table makes viewers think about the relationship between two people sharing a meal and the sharing of a heart.
Another piece, this time mounted on the wall, is made of wood and beeswax.
Carved into the planks of wood is a ribcage and it’s finished off by being covered in dripping beeswax. The piece is titled “Purification” and leaves a lot open for interpretation, much like the rest of the exhibit.
Perhaps the most noticeable piece in the room is the bone ladder than hangs from the balcony all the way to the floor. Titled “Dead End,” the piece has fourteen porcelain bones that are held together by a thick rope and make a ladder. The top three bones are cracked. That would make this ladder impossible to use. You put in the hard work of getting close to the end only to find yourself unable to make all the way there bringing you to a dead end.
Other pieces include a cast of a human body with a crack down the front of the chest; a door with a face on it that has the doorknob replaced with a hand; and a set of hands and feet all filled with things like French fries and soda.
The whole exhibit uses unconventional pieces along with ceramics and porcelain to make a lot of very strong points about humans and the way we treat our bodies.
“I thought the exhibit was really interesting…the bones and body parts were very real and life like,” says freshman Jordin Pearson. “The exhibit made me think about what’s actually inside me and how when you bring all these bones, your skin, and hair together you get people who are extremely different, but at the end of the day we are all made up of the same thing.”
The exhibit surely is up to you to define it’s meaning, but one thing is for certain, Lauren Denler’s work will leave exhibit visitors thinking about the anatomy we all share.
