“Critical Junctures,” the first of the 2010 exhibitions in the Donald Sheehan Gallery, features a genre unusual to the space. Sculpture and installation art pieces by Eileen Doktorski were unveiled at an opening reception on Friday, Jan. 22, and will remain there until the exhibit closes on Feb. 19. Dawn Forbes, Sheehan Gallery director, pointed out that Doktorski is one of only a few installation artists ever to have had work showcased there.
“We do installations, but not as regularly as I like, in part because they take a tremendous amount of work and space,” Forbes said. “We haven’t had an exhibition like this in quite some time.”
Doktorski, who received her bachelor’s degree from Parsons School of Design and her master’s from Yale, served as a visiting assistant professor at Whitman about eight years ago and is currently head of the art department at San Jacinto College in Southern California. She has had more than 15 solo exhibitions over the last several years and has achieved a number of awards and honors.
Forbes worked to bring in this particular exhibition, but they are generally decided upon by a selection committee, and come from a variety of sources.
The gallery currently showcases three of Doktorski’s pieces: “Oblivion,” “Domestic Arsenal” and “Artifacts of Affluence.” Doktorski self-identifies as a social-political artist and said that the pieces currently on display reflect a number of social and political themes. “Oblivion” and “The Artifacts of Affluence” speak to ecological and environmental issues, she said, while “Domestic Arsenal” addresses the trauma of family and domestic abuse.
“Artifacts of Affluence” features brightly lit, bronzed casts of items that one might find in a landfill ranging from discarded bicycle tires to the head and organs of a calf.
“I found the juxtaposition between the well-defined, easily identifiable objects, such as a book or lipstick and the surrounding rubble to be very visually pleasing,” said sophomore Emma O’Rourke Powell.
A number of visitors to the gallery found “Domestic Arsenal” particularly provocative; the piece is a memorial to victims of family violence, according to Doktorski. “Domestic Arsenal” is displayed in a smaller room within the gallery and in order to see it the viewer must enter the room. The piece is comprised of a mountain of household items and was inspired by the mounds of personal belongings Doktorski saw when she visited the Auschwitz museum in Poland.
According to Doktorski, most of the items used in this piece are cast and Raku-fired, giving them an iridescent glow which lures the viewer into the room. The iridescence is not only mimics the after-effects of a fire, she said, but also represents the resilience of the human spirit.
“If this were just totally flat black it would look very dead,” Doktorski said, “But it’s not dead. People have been through incredible trauma and they’re still survivors.”
Also among the items cast are children’s toys, objects such as hockey sticks and shoes and the six weapon pieces from the game “Clue.” Doktorski researched cases of family violence in which household items had been used to injure or kill another person and put those items into the piece.
“I’m hoping [this piece] has a residual effect of people understanding the horror of what it must be to live in a home where you were afraid of the objects,” she said.
