Senior art history major Lindsay Kearney ’15 has curated a show for the Trout Gallery entitled “Bones: Representing the Macabre,” which opens March 5th with a reception from 4-6pm. The show will open in the upper section of the gallery and run until April 18.
This exhibition will focus on the use of bones in art, with specific emphasis on Macabre, which focuses on the depiction of death. Kearney went into some detail on the theme, and said, “some pieces deal with science, medicine, and anatomy, some are particularly horrific and evoke scenes of war, death, and destruction (mostly inspired by WWI), some follow the medieval ‘dance of death’ motif where a skeleton or Death comes to take away members of the living.” She continued, “some are really quite hopeful in nature and deal with issues of the afterlife and the memory of one’s ancestors.”

All students have the opportunity to curate exhibitions at Dickinson. Kearney contacted Associate Professor of Art and Art History Phillip Earenfight, who is Director of the Trout Gallery, to express her desire to curate a show. “I had been talking to Professor Earenfight about doing something curatorial with the Trout Gallery, and he sort of had this idea as a pet project already,” said Kearney. She continued, “I took his original idea, and he had a few pieces from the collection that he saved, and then it expanded from there and a little bit refined. It was a more informal proposal process since it was more like a dialogue.”
The theme dictated the pieces, rather than the inverse. Kearney explained that they began looking through the collection for anything with a bone in it, and even pieces made by bone; for three months the title remained simply, “bones.” All of the pieces in the exhibition are supplied by Dickinson, either from the permanent collection, or the archives. “Most of them, by chance really, are prints. We have one very tiny ivory sculpture of a skeleton, which is a Japanese netsuke figure. We have one painting, one photograph, everything else is a print,” said Kearney.

This exhibition will mark the Trout Gallery’s attempt for a more interactive experience. Computer science majors Xin Guan ’15 and Yutong Shang ’16 are helping develop a Trout Gallery app. “We have audio guides for reading images visually on each of the images, zoomable images of each object, and links to look more into an artist or a process,” said Kearney. “Right now it’s pretty much just bones because we’re just building it,” she continued. This exhibition will be the test run for the app, to “help bring the Trout Gallery into the 21st century,” said Kearney.

The show will open in the upper section of the gallery and run from March 5 until April 18.

The final two exhibitions for the academic year will be the art history senior project, titled “The Spirit of the Sixties: Art as an Agent for Change,” which will run from February 27 – April 11, and the studio art thesis project, which will be from April 24 – May 16.