Graphic Design Junior Clinton Robinson takes a turn holding the projector as his fellow students And Scalin continue to lay out recycled paper on the piece.
What was once the spacious floor of the Visual Arts lobby now contains a large and original piece of art created by enthusiastic student and artist Noah Scalin.
At 9 a.m. yesterday, students could be seen raiding classrooms for their paper recycling bins and taking them to the lobby where they would be repurposed into a new, green piece of art. Students made short work of moving the tables and chairs and quickly began to tape out the outline of the skull that had projected onto the floor. This is the second collaborative student piece that Scalin has done.
“I asked Jen Venn what we had a lot of here and she said paper,” Scalin chuckled as he held the projector over his head to get the proper angle for the skull.
“I’m very open about how this stuff gets done. When I was creating a piece for the Mutters museum, I asked them what they had. They had slices of human brain in acrylic.”
Students were as excited as Scalin about the piece that was slowly coming to life before them. Layer by layer, the skull gained dimension as newspaper and flyers from the recycling bins were added to the piece.
“It’s a pretty amazing project. It’s creative and we’re recycling, which is great,” said Clinton Robinson, a junior in Graphic Design. “I also really like working with distorted images.” This is Robinson’s first collaborative piece outside of class projects.
The creation of the piece also broadened the perspective of other graphic design students and stirred the creativity within them.
“It’s cool to see outside graphic designers come in and showing us their work,” said Brooke Reints, a Graphic Design major. “It’s inspiration to go beyond what we are doing on the computer by doing a big skull on the floor of our art building.”
“I think it is cool how you can make a design like this by just bunching up paper,” junior Lauren Prather said. She and Reints observed part of the process from the stairs and balcony which allow them a better vantage point.
The skull was completed in roughly two hours by the team of Scalin and the students. The piece will be left in the lobby for the week for others to enjoy before it is dismantled and recycled once again.
The finished skull made out of recycled paper.
