11/13/2005 10:04:00 PM Email this article ? Print this article
Artist draws from emotion, regions for painted motifs
Wade Coggeshall
Reporter
As early as preschool, Elizabeth Huey has been fascinated with art, particularly painting and drawing. During a strange and emotionally searing adolescence, she became entrenched in psychology.
Her experience and subsequent studies are now partially responsible for painted motifs that can be both fantastically mirthful and symbolically unsettling.
As part of Wabash College?s McGregor Visiting Artist series, Huey will present her exhibition, ?The Old Jail.? The opening reception is 8-9:30 p.m. today in the Randolph Deer Art Wing of the Eric Dean Gallery at Wabash College?s Fine Arts Center. The Eponymous Trio also will perform. Gallery hours are 8 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Friday and 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Saturday.
Huey first came to Crawfordsville in August to find inspiration for the exhibition. Besides an obvious visit to the Old Jail Museum, she took in several area antique stores and the Indiana Medical History Museum on Indianapolis?s west side.
?It?s been a really enlightening time for me,? Huey said. ?I look for a little flavor in every region I visit in the United States.?
The Medical History Museum once was connected to an insane asylum, where doctors studied their patients after they died by performing lobotomies. Peering into the mind is a recurring theme in Huey?s art.
The Virginia native and Brooklyn resident attributes that focus from her own experience of being institutionalized as a teen for two years.
?I was definitely an over-emotional and rebellious teenager,? Huey said. ?I started drinking early and running away from home. I was socially ill-equipped. My parents talked to a therapist because they didn?t know what to do. The therapist recommended they send me to this place.?
She?s talking about Straight Inc., a nationwide program for troubled teens. Huey was sent to the one in Springfield, Va., just outside Washington, D.C.
?You had to sit in the same room from 8 a.m. until sometimes midnight, in the same chair, with no windows, and just listen to people all day talk, one at a time,? she said of the experience. ?Yeah, it got me interested in thought processes (a reference to her bachelor?s degree in psychology from George Washington University). Teenagers without radio and television, couldn?t go to school for quite a while until we earned the right. We were just in that room.?
Huey said Straight Inc. affected some 50,000 teens. It has since been closed for numerous allegations of abuse. But when asked how if affected her, Huey can?t give a specific answer.
?That?s the question that, for me, in part, continues to drive my work because it was such an intense experience,? she said. ?It shaped my life for better and worse. Every memorable experience for me embodies both ? very great things and things that aren?t so great.?
Such an event helps explain Huey?s attraction to the Old Jail, other than that she?d previously never heard of such a circular structure.
?(Prisoners) were really trapped in there, and someone else had to crank it to move it,? Huey said. ?As a metaphor, there are definitely things in my own life and things I see in other people?s lives that feel a little bit locked in and it keeps going around, there?s a desire to exit a situation, but maybe it?s difficult to get out. And visually, there?s no exit there.?
?The Old Jail? exhibition will feature Huey?s first sculpture ? a recreation of the interior of a room in a tutor-style house, complete with barred windows ? along with drawings and two large-scale collages. Much of her work centers on dualities: humans vs. nature, freedom vs. oppression, what is real vs. what your mind perceives, control vs. subjugation. The complexities of behavior and emotion afford Huey a wealth of stimuli in which to parse.
?I?m definitely interested in both the architectural and the organic,? she said. ?It?s very difficult, especially in New York, to go to a park without the intrusion of things like power lines and gas pipes. There?s very little left of the pristine landscape that one might?ve seen a hundred years ago. So I?ve opted to embrace that in my work and emphasize it. For me it begins to represent what I believe does happen in the mind ? that there are these things we can control, and then there are these things that are completely out of our control.
?During the Renaissance time, seeing the paintings then, the way they sculpted the landscapes and made elaborate people. They did this in part because they were afraid of the wild. At that time you never knew what could attack you. Even though we?re not living in that kind of world anymore, there?s this attempt still to make and build things we can have control over, turn on and turn off. That becomes even more prevalent in light of what?s happening with the weather and this feeling of the world being out of control.?
On the Net:
http://www.elizabethhuey.comhttp://www.wabash.eduIndiana Medical History Museum:
http://www.imhm.org http://www.journalreview.com/main.asp?S ... TM=84636.2When an innocent Californian millionaire gets killed by a drug squad
trying to seize his house with a bogus search warrant, people better ask themselves if they really want to turn their cops into money-makers.
--Vancouver Police Const. Gil Puder
