Ambiguous appeal of ‘Sleepwalk With Us’

Sleepwalk With Us is a BFA group exhibition featuring the work of Aidan Romick, Jack Johnson, and Eleanor Gollin, is on view in The Commons at NYU Steinhardt’s Barney Building

Tiffany Chen

Sleepwalk With Us is a BFA group exhibition featuring the work of Aidan Romick, Jack Johnson, and Eleanor Gollin, is on view in The Commons at NYU Steinhardt’s Barney Building

Daria Butler, Staff Writer

Undergraduate students of the Studio Art program present “Sleepwalk with Us,” a sometimes indiscernible collection of multimedia art pieces. The exhibit at Steinhardt’s Commons gallery opened on Wednesday and will run until Saturday, Oct. 31 at 10pm. The exhibit opened on Wednesday, Oct. 21 and features the work of students Aidan Romick, Jack Johnson and Eleanor Gollin.

Only spanning a single-room gallery, the exhibit is sparse and vague, its purpose ambiguous. Typically, exhibits will begin with an artist’s statement underneath the title on the wall, but not so here. It is simply the title of the exhibit, the names of the artists and the artwork itself.

“Sleepwalk with Us” features a few different media, such as wood assemblages forming human shapes, hanging canvases with stitched images of nude women and silhouette cutouts of people in various prostrating positions.

In the middle of the gallery on the floor is a conglomerate of primary colored wood shards resembling puzzle pieces. If facing the entrance, the left most wall is lined with portraits done in black marker, each one presenting a new variation of the same face. Moving through the room clockwise, towards the end of the gallery, is a small TV showing another portrait but of a different face.

Overall, the lack of information about the art was almost unsettling. One craves to know more about each piece, which artist did what and how they all connect. The exhibit is, for lack of a better word, bizarre, and the end leaves one confused as to the motivation behind it. However, it also allows one to draws his own conclusions, which can prove to be quite refreshing. Maybe the various pieces match up somehow, or maybe they don’t mean anything at all — maybe they don’t have to.

The Commons Barney Building houses student exhibitions changing every two to three weeks. The next exhibit hosted at the building will be the “Seniors Honors Project,” which runs from Nov. 2 to Nov. 7, in which senior honors students will present their work in a week long screening series.

 

Email Daria Butler at [email protected].