Morlan Gallery

LEXINGTON, Ky.—Transylvania University’s Studio 300: Digital Art and Music Festival showcases the cutting edge of art in the digital age with nine exhibitions, three concerts and four lectures presented by 33 musicians and 130 artists in just two days. The festival, free and open to the community, is Oct. 4 and 5. Exploring creative manifestations of technology is the festival’s focus. Timothy Polashek, director of the festival and assistant professor of music at Transylvania, emphasizes the importance of innovation: “All the artists and musicians involved are also technologists who build their own tools, instead of using preexisting tools in traditional ways. This is one of the factors that makes Studio 300 really exciting.” Polashek is himself a software creator and an internationally recognized composer. Studio 300’s exhibitions include “Waves & Currents: An Exploration of Sound, Light, and Time,” by Montréal artist Lenka Novakova and Boston artist Georgie Friedman, in Transylvania’s Morlan Gallery through Oct. 11. Other notable exhibitions include “Vox-Novus 60×60 Video Mix” and the BYTE Gallery International Exhibition. “60×60” is a one-hour multimedia performance made up of sixty 60-second or shorter compositions by artists from around the world. The BYTE Gallery International Exhibition will feature 45 works, selected from several hundred internationally submitted entries. The BYTE gallery features video, audio and still images from all over the world, including Iran, Germany, Puerto Rico, Argentina, Japan, Italy and France. Three multi-artist concerts and four Art Talks over the two days

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LEXINGTON, Ky.—An exhibition incorporating video and sound waves to evoke the sights and sounds of moving water kicks off the Morlan Gallery season. “Waves & Currents: An Exploration of Sound, Light, and Time” opens Friday, Sept. 6, and runs through Friday, Oct. 11. The exhibition features two video installations: Dark Swell by Boston artist Georgie Friedman and River by Montreal artist Lenka Novakova. The title “Waves & Currents” references not only the ocean waves and river currents visually represented in the video installations, but also the media in which the artists are working: sound waves and electrical current. “The combination of water and electricity is normally a cause for alarm, but in this case, the results are electrifying in the most positive sense,” says Morlan Gallery director Andrea Fisher. Novakova’s multi-channel video installation “River” transforms the entire gallery space by simulating the experience of being caught up in a river current. The installation consists of multiple conical screens suspended from the ceiling leaving space in-between for participants to walk comfortably. Multiple projectors display river images on the screens. Meanwhile, Friedman’s “Dark Swell” depicts an ocean wave rumbling on a 9-foot-tall and 14-foot-wide wave-like form. The two-channel video installation is projected in various wave frequencies so it moves around the viewer, while a pulsating audio-scape emanates from speakers. Georgie Friedman is an interdisciplinary artist whose projects include large-scale video installations, single and multi-channel videos and several photographic series. She has lived,

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Work by Katelynn Ralston LEXINGTON, Ky.—Transylvania University’s six graduating art majors will showcase their work in a senior thesis exhibition titled “3XD: Design, Displace, Daddy Issues,” April 4-19 in the Morlan Gallery in the Mitchell Fine Arts Center. Artists Paul Michael Brown, Rachel Kimbrough, Meredith Mullican, Katelynn Ralston, Emily Shirley and Amanda Skinner, working in a wide range of media, decided to pair their work according to theme, thus the three exhibition subtitles: design, displace, and daddy issues. Mullican and Skinner created work concerned with design, specifically the process involved in interior design and environmentally and socially sustainable architecture. Kimbrough and Shirley address the social issues of introverted personality and consumption of idealized feminine youth through notions of displacement. Brown and Ralston elaborate on the complexities of queerness, in both the private and the political, while playing with emotional distance or ‘daddy issues.’ The public is invited to celebrate the accomplishments of the six seniors at the opening reception for the artists on Thursday, April 4, from 5-8 p.m. The art majors will give presentations in the Morlan Gallery on Tuesday, April 9, from 12:30-1:20 p.m. The exhibition concludes with the Lexington Gallery Hop on Friday, April 19, from 5-8 p.m. The Morlan Gallery’s regular hours are noon-5 p.m. weekdays. For more information, contact Andrea Fisher, gallery director, at (859) 233-8142, or afisher@transy.edu.

Sara Turner (Cricket Press) “The Walkmen” (2012) LEXINGTON, Ky.—Transylvania University’s Morlan Gallery celebrates local printmakers with its newest exhibition, Lexington Legatees: Contemporary Printmaking in the Bluegrass, which opens Monday, Nov. 5, and runs through Wednesday, Dec. 5. The exhibition focuses on Lexington printmakers who carry on the city’s strong printmaking history. Artists in the exhibition include Nick Alley, Cricket Press (Sara and Brian Turner), Joel Feldman, Liz Foley, Homegrown Press (Johnny Lackey), Hound Dog Press (Nick Baute and Robert Ronk), Larkspur Press (Gray Zeitz) and dRock Press (Derrick Riley). Kentucky’s first printmaker set up shop in Lexington in 1787. John Bradford unloaded his press and type from the Ohio River landing in Maysville and traversed 65 miles of rough roads to establish the Kentucke Gazette. In the 1940s, when hobby presses were all the rage, noted Viennese artist and printmaker Victor Karl Hammer moved to Lexington to serve as artist-in-residence at Transylvania. The quick result was a deepening dedication to the fine craft of book arts by these home press operators. Although Hammer had many devotees, it was printmaker Carolyn Reading who advanced the press in Lexington perhaps more than any other, eventually establishing the King Library Press, located in the Margaret I. King Library at the University of Kentucky. Reading and Hammer married in 1955. Lexington Legatees artist Gray Zeitz bridges the gap between the vibrant Hammer era and today’s resurgent printmaking scene in Lexington. Zeitz, who learned the

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LEXINGTON, Ky.—Transylvania University’s Morlan Gallery opens its 2012-13 season on Sept. 17 with Ink in the Cage: The Stories Behind MMA Fighter Tattoos. The exhibition, an installation of larger-than-life photographic images, runs through Oct. 26. While tattoos are common among mixed martial arts (MMA) fighters and are highly visible in the cage, the stories behind them are less public. Ink in the Cage is a photographic exploration of those tattoos that reveal unique aspects of fighter identities—their convictions, passions and personal histories. Through interview excerpts and photographs, observers are granted entrée into the private lives of these athletes whose tattoos commemorate major turning points, serve as reminders of loved ones, echo religious sentiments and are frequently symbols of the philosophy fighters live by, both inside and outside the cage. Anthropology professor Barbara LoMonaco, who was named vice president for student affairs and dean of students this summer, began the project over two years ago. She combined her passion for mixed martial arts fighting and her academic interests in the gendered meanings underlying body decoration cross-culturally. She teamed up with photographer Angela Baldridge, a 2004 Transylvania University graduate with a master’s degree in visual communications from Syracuse University. Baldridge’s work has taken her to California, Las Vegas, New York, Mexico, Germany, Hungary, England and all over Kentucky, where she has been inspired by people’s shared and individual stories.  LoMonaco and Baldridge traveled to Las Vegas, Lexington, Los Angeles, Hollywood, San Diego

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