Posted on April 5, 2007
This week, a new project entitled “Pine” will be installed in the sculpture garden outside Duke Hall as part of the East Coast Sculpture Exchange.
Three universities are participating in the exchange and have sent faculty members to visit with sculpture classes, present a public lecture about their work and spend a week completing a public sculpture at the host campus.
Professors Tom Ashcraft and Peter Winant of George Mason University are heading up the project at JMU, while JMU professor Greg Stewart will build a sculpture at the University of Georgia and Georgia professor R.G. Brown will work at GMU.
Ashcroft’s work has been displayed in North Carolina, Georgia, Washington D.C. and New York. He also designed a bookstore called Bookworks for the Washington Project for the Arts in D.C., the Andros Island Art Project in the Bahamas, 9/11 Memorial site work and Five Mile Line, a public works project in Montana.
“We’re building a ping-pong table out of Southern Pine … surrounded by bench seating,” Ashcroft said.
While this may not seem like art to some people, Ashcraft explained: “It becomes a catalyst for social space.”
Winant has been a member of the art artist collaborative group “Art Attack” for 20 years, where he exhibits and performs in a number of locations including Berlin, Prague,
Slovakia, Marseilles, Warsaw, Krakow, Chicago, Washington D.C. and New York. His work is in private collections throughout the United States.
Winant also explained the choice of ping-pong.
“It seems to be a pretty universal experience,” he said, adding that the unique thing about this project is that “its fulfillment requires participation by the audience. We’ve got 300 ping-pong balls on order and 50 paddles.”
One concern regarding the sculpture is the choice of southern pine as a building material, as it brings up environmentalist and sustainability issues with the southern logging industry.
But, Ashcroft said, “It’s all about finding connections.” He wants his piece to become “a hybrid of the pragmatics of building and the content of the piece itself.”
The sculpture is scheduled to be put in place Friday.
“We’re going to leave this piece behind, it belongs to JMU and the JMU community,” Winant said.
