| Vaughn Bell places corn down to create a map of the United States at the Walter E. Terhune Art Gallery at Owens Community College. (Photo: Andrew Weber/Sentinel-Tribune) |
Some artists paint landscapes. Vaughn Bell creates her own landscape.
Sometimes she even lets viewers take her landscapes for walks.
An exhibit of the Seattle-based artist’s work, "Transported Landscapes," opens Friday at the
Terhune Gallery in Owens Community College’s Center for the Fine and performing Arts, Oregon Road,
Perrysburg Township.
Bell speaks about her work tonight at 7 at the gallery.
"I hope the exhibit," Bell said, "is a way for people to get a different view of the
places we live, places we visit … The physical connection to the artwork is a stand in for our
physical connection to nature."
The show has three elements. In one, she will fill small wheeled pots with moss, similar she said to the
forest floor. These can be pulled around the gallery, and possibly outside. These represent the forests
she loves to visit.
The show also includes portable models of mountains. Those peaks, she said, were inspired by the
mountains in Washington State that loam in the distance of her home city. She can seldom see them
because they are obscured by the city’s buildings and by persistent overcast. "I thought it would
be interesting to bring mountains to a place that didn’t have mountains."
The largest work also has transportation as its theme.
Bell will draw a map of the United States on the floor of the Owens gallery and then outline the
interstate highway system using seed corn donated by Midwood. Those interstates, she said, make an
interesting grid pattern on the map.
When she researched Northwest Ohio for the project, she learned about how central agriculture was, and
how those products spread across the country and the world.
Her interest in nature and art started early. Both her parents were landscape architects, so she spent
her childhood in parks and gardens. Born in Syracuse, N.Y., she later moved to southeastern Virginia
with its coast and tidal areas.
When she went to Brown University in Providence, R.I., she couldn’t decide whether she wanted to study
the environment or art, so she created her own major Nature and Culture. It was while doing graduate
work at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston that she realized how she could bring those two
concerns together.
Bell created gardens in shopping carts. The first one was for herself, but then she had to leave it in
care of a friend. From there she decided to do more. Everyone who "adopted" a garden had to
pledge to take care of it. Tending the garden would become, Bell said, part of the art.
At tonight’s reception she’ll offer a miniature version of that – tiny biospheres, moss, soil, even
mites, in Easter egg shaped containers. Those attending can take one, if they agree to care for it.
