Show offs

For the first time, LSU’s art faculty show has left the Glassell Gallery on the ground floor of the Shaw Center for the fifth floor galleries of LSU’s Museum of Art.

That switch allows 24 faculty members to showcase 85 diverse works all this month—featuring everything from ceramics to printmaking to digital media.

“It’s a much bigger space. People are able to put two or three pieces in, so it’s possible to see a broader range of work,” says School of Art Director Rod Parker.

Some of the more fascinating pieces use art and design to turn crude data and information into something aesthetically interesting.

Featured a few times is digital art assistant professor Frederick Ostrenko, offering up an iPad game about company mergers, blown glass orbs embedded with flickering lights that recorded his brain waves, and a collaboration with School of Music assistant professor Jesse Allison that translates real-time data about a stretch of the Mississippi River into sounds that reverberate across the backs of 18 wood boards hanging from the ceiling.

Also exploring information as art, Loren Schwerd built a collage of synthetic raffia pieces inspired by maps of the BP oil spill’s ever-changing extent across the Gulf. And Courtney Barr’s intricate and meticulous digital prints about her personal life and the people she’s met turn the idea of an infographic into dizzying designs you can get lost in.

Couple that with excellent examples of photography, ceramics like Michaelene Walsh’s work (pictured above), painting and more, and it’s a fine first showing in the LSU Museum, which Parker calls a “reinvigoration of the relationship between the museum and the school.”

The works are on view until Feb. 16. lsumoa.org