PRESQUE ISLE — The University of Maine at Presque Isle’s Reed Art Gallery will host the exhibit “By the Numbers: Multiplicity, Meaning and Art” by Dr. Owen F. Smith, Correll professor of new media at the University of Maine, from Tuesday, Jan. 19 through Saturday, Feb. 27.
The public is invited to view the exhibition and attend a gallery reception on Friday, Feb. 5 from 5-7 p.m., in conjunction with the First Friday Art Walk. Smith will speak at 5:30 p.m.
Smith is an artist, art historian, curator, writer and teacher who is interested in exploring the cultural gap between art and life. He is a leading scholar in the Fluxus movement, an art movement that emerged in the late 1950s by Lithuanian-born artist George Maciunas.
“We are very pleased to host an artist, scholar and educator of Smith’s stature on this campus,” Reed Gallery Director Heather Sincavage said. “In the shifting attitudes of what we value in our culture, I am interested in how Smith identifies and determines the system of values.”
The Fluxus movement advocates that art should be accessible to the masses and available for anyone to be a participant; art is to connect people together and blur the boundary between art and life.
“Smith embodies the Fluxus ideology and will present an exhibition that is a contemporary analyzation of ourselves,” Sincavage said.
Prominent Fluxus artists are Yoko Ono, John Cage, Nam June Paik, Alison Knowles, Dick Higgins and Allan Kaprow. Fluxus is the movement where “chance operation” was embraced and performance art born.
Smith received his Ph.D. from University of Washington in 1991. He received the University of Maine Presidential Research and Creative Achievement Award in 2010 and the Maine Innovative Industries Initiative, MTAF Award (totaling $3.69 million) in 2009. He is the author of the prominent Fluxus book, “Fluxus, The History of an Attitude,” and has been editor/essayist to many journals and exhibition catalogs.
Smith wrote, “As an intermedial artist I believe that the exploration of materials and processes of an ephemeral nature are an important and vital form of creative activity. The variety of forms in which I work are significant for me in their very nature, for they are both concrete and ephemeral.”
He asks himself three questions central to the practitioners of Fluxus: “What is the relationship between the artist and the audience?”; What are the materials of art?”; and What are the process of manipulation/creation available to the artist?”
The public is encouraged to view the Reed Gallery exhibit and see Smith’s resolution of these questions in By the Numbers: Multiplicity, Meaning and Art.
All are invited to come out to First Friday Art Walk on Feb. 5 and attend this free event. Light refreshments will be served.
The gallery is newly located in the Center for Innovative Learning and is open Monday through Wednesday, 7:30 a.m.-10 p.m.; Thursday and Friday, 7:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m., Saturday, 12-5 p.m.; and Sunday, 5-10 p.m. The gallery is closed during University holidays.
