“Pareidolia,” a painting and drawing mixed media exhibit by senior studio art major Justin Leitner, is the newest gallery in the Looking Glass Gallery and opens Thursday.
The exhibition is the final result of a week-long search for a replacement exhibit after previous artist Zak Corsi pulled his work a few days before it was set to open.
“This is the second time that I’ve been working at a gallery when an artist drops at the last moment, but it does happen,” Dianna Loughlin, curator of the Looking Glass gallery, said. “It’s been kind of crazy trying to pull together a show in a week’s time.”
The exhibition is free and will be on view from Sept. 18 through Oct. 9 at the Looking Glass Gallery located in Plemmons Student Union.
The Appalachian conducted a Q&A with Loughlin about the exhibition.
The Appalachian: What is your role in the process of showing art? What is the process usually like?
Dianna Loughlin: “As curator, my job is to collect submission from around campus, most of which coming from students but we also work with faculty and staff and sometime alumni from ASU. I’ll take all of these submissions and compile them into a presentation for the PSU arts committee, which is a selection of individuals who go through proposals with me, and we decide what shows will be coming up in the next semester.”
TA: What difficulties did you encounter with this specific show?
DL: “We had an exhibition that was planned and decided upon for this semester that we decided on in the spring. I had been having some difficulty getting in contact with the artist and he actually told me a few days ago that he’s been sick and hasn’t been able to respond at all. At that point, since his exhibition was so in depth and required some collaborations with other departments around the university, we weren’t able to pull an exhibition together for this show by the time he told us he was interested.”
TA: What does this exhibition mean?
DL: “The word ‘pareidolia’ is described as ‘when you’re lying on your back and looking up at the clouds.’ You know how you can see little shapes and stuff in the clouds? Well it’s kind of the same thing with this work. What he does it he paints a lot of landscapes and portraiture, and while the paint is drying he finds little shapes and what he calls characters and he fills in a lot of the negative spaces in his work using a marker or ink to find these little characters and sort of bring them out from the painting. ”
TA: What drew you to this specific collection initially?
DL: “Justin is actually a peer of mine in the art department, and I first saw him developing this work about a year ago. Some of his paintings started showing up in the art department and I was really interested in the visual imagery. He’s a really great landscape painter, but he puts a new twist on it and I’m always interested in artists that push it to the next level. I saw a lot of his work over in a gallery on King Street, he just had a show there this past first Friday.We have students passing by of all majors that might not necessarily go to art crawl. It’s a really nice way to show the kinds of art that’s being created and shown elsewhere to fresh eyes in this gallery.”
TA: Do you have a personal favorite piece from this collection?
DL: “I do, it’s called ‘Multiverse.’ It’s a square canvas and it’s one of those traditional landscape pieces that I was talking about with a lot of immaculate detailed characters coming out of nowhere and toward the bottom right corner there’s a little fat man with glasses on a unicycle. When you get up close with this piece and others there’s a lot of texture and skill that he shows with layering his paint and making his own colors. It’s really beautiful.”
Story: LOVEY COOPER, Intern A&E Reporter