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Dark installation opens art festivities photo by Bob Pennell By Bill Varble Burnt logs fill the main gallery at the Schneider Museum like the charred remains of a giant game of pickup sticks. Artist Judy Pfaff calls her moody installation "The Black Room." The installation is part of an exhibit of Pfaff�s work called "Transforming Traditions," which opens with a reception at 6 this evening in the Schneider on the campus of Southern Oregon University in Ashland. SOU celebrates visual arts Southern Oregon University will celebrate the grand opening of its $11.5 million Center for the Visual Arts complex through the weekend. The public is invited to the following festivities: Tonight at 6 � Opening reception, Judy Pfaff exhibition, Schneider Museum of Art. Exhibition continues through Jan. 20. Museum hours, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday, and first Fridays from 4-7 p.m. Suggested donation $2. Friday, 5 p.m. � Grand opening celebration for the Center for the Visual Arts, central plaza. Keynote speaker: John Frohnmayer, former director of the National Endowment for the Arts. A pre-show gathering will feature music composed and performed by SOU faculty, photo displays and sonotube sculptures painted by local artists. Also, refreshments and tours. Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. � SOU art department faculty will give tours of the new buildings; also, demonstrations and hands-on activities. Information: 552-6245. The exhibit is keyed to this weekend�s grand opening of SOU�s new $11.5 million Center for the Visual Arts, the theme of which is "The Artist in the 21st Century: Transforming Traditions." Pfaff, 55, is a New York artist whose installations combine references to architecture, art and nature into provocative paradigm busters that transform exhibit halls into, well, interesting spaces. She holds a master of fine arts degree from Yale University, teaches at Bard College in New York and exhibits in galleries all over the world. Pfaff�s works helped transform painting, sculpture and installation as they filled galleries with gestures of color and form and later with bold configurations of metals, translucent objects and, yes, burnt trees. "Transforming Traditions" comprises works from different times in Pfaff�s career. They range from 1980s pieces reflecting her move to the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn (displayed in the Schneider�s Treehaven gallery) to domestic-themed sculptures in the entry gallery to the Black Room (which is actually the dark half of what was originally a two-room installation called "Notes on Light and Shadow"). "I think I could have used two more rooms," says Pfaff, taking a break as two assistants work with burnt logs and steel rods. Pfaff is surrounded by sculptures that mix large rat�s nest-like agglomerations of wire with found objects that look like they�re from a kitchen. What can she say about using large, burnt logs, some strung together with curvilinear steel rods that suggest dream-like roots, others partially concealing weird, translucent, worm-like shapes at their hollow cores? "The images reveal themselves," she says. Pfaff steers clear of those flights of artsy interpretation that are de rigueur in much of the art world. "There are probably ideas in here of interest to the art world but to nobody else," she says. She had been searching in Washington for trees ("like when you see those mythic shapes in front of the moon") and happened upon men burning stumps in a field near Pilchuck, Wash. "It looked like a garden of kind of strange, kind of beautiful, kind of African objects," she says. The installation was shown recently at Brigham Young University in Utah, among other places. Pfaff acquired a surplus Forest Service pickup truck with a crew cab, a big engine, and a stick shift, then hooked up an open 20-foot trailer and drove the rig and the burnt logs here from Utah. "Guys in gas stations just couldn�t believe it," she says. "You can�t tell them you�re an artist. I�d say I was a landscaper doing something for some rich person, and they�d believe that." One reaction Pfaff gets is the assumption that the installation is some kind of environmental statement about deforestation and the rape of the land. "In part it is, I guess," she says. "But really it�s just imagery. I think they have sensations in them. "There�s something about being in it. All I�ve been trying to do is honor them." In high school, Pfaff spent hours with Diego Rivera murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Later, snorkeling in the Gulf of Mexico, she realized fish were coming from all sides. This awareness of patterns on the edge of experience became a kind of sculpture that was a bit like being inside a painting. Then she started painting walls and ceilings and floors of galleries and filling the three-dimensional space with forms (she�s painted walls at the Schneider with a dye used by theaters for costumes). Her brow furrows at trying to put into words what the Black Room is "about." "I think it�s about sadness," she says. "Some things maybe you didn�t like to think about at the time, like death, but looking back you can see them." Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2000 Mail Tribune, Inc.