The Muhlenberg Weekly

Issue date: 2/1/07 Section: Life!

Those looking for thought-provoking art need not look any further than the College's Martin Art Gallery. Until March 2, the gallery will be featuring Amze Emmons: Recent Work, featuring the art of Professor of Art Amze Emmons, Assistant. The exhibit is an accumulation of work that Emmons has been preparing for about a year and a half, with inspiration channeling from media images found in The New York Times.

In his exhibit catalog, Emmons emphasizes that it isn't the news events that he is inspired to depict, but the images of these events: Details taken from small, black and white photos, depicting the smoking shells of bombed buildings, the wreckage left after receding flood waters in New Orleans, tsunami mangled villages, car bombings, and troop movements on the streets of Baghdad.

Emmons presents these images to us with a combination of drawing, print and painting. Many pieces are done with a variety of mediums: graphite, gouache, acrylic, colored pencil and intaglio with screen-print. Emmons' boldly colored sketches are often placed in minimalist landscapes or against atypically-colored skies. The result is an eye-catching series of images that makes you look - and think - twice about the titles of the work. Images such as "Fear of Thunder" and "After Taste" place carefully constructed sketches and forms against landscapes littered with small fragments of rock and material. Many of the works evoke a sort of abandoned quality; these are sites that have experienced past disaster, but have not yet picked up the shards and tatters from the event.

"It wasn't the events that I was responding to; it was the imagery of the events in the media. There has always been war, strife and natural disasters, but what I'm interested in is figuring out what it means to live in a world where we are bombarded with more images of those horrors than ever before in history, and the numbing effect that has on our collective senses," stated Emmons.

Emmons' exhibit is sure to suit a range of artistic tastes. "I am inspired by too many artists to name," said Emmons. "To take the time to make a work of art in the world we live in is a pretty inspiring thing to do." His frequent depiction of boxes, crates and minimalist buildings bring a very industrial feel to the work. Precise sketches look like they could be blueprints for an architect.

The bold colors and comic-book like feel of some pieces is reminiscent of 1950s pop-art images. And titles like "Insurgent Site" and "Nostalgia for What the Future Used to Be" garner much political opinion, though he noted, "My work is not intended to be political in the sense that it speaks about political issues. I am more interested in trying to understand larger cultural systems that affect the way we think."

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