UAB Briefs: Big night at AEIVA, chamber music, BlazerCon
Welcome to another installment of UAB Briefs, in which we keep track of interesting people and events on campus.
Know people, places and programs on the UAB campus that deserve a mention?
Email Iron City Ink at sydney@starnespublishing.com or jchambers@starnespublishing.com.
Picked by an Angel
The UAB Department of Art and Art History and the Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts have a big night planned at AEIVA for Friday, March 31.
Visiting artist Jessica Angel will unveil her large, site-specific installation, “Facing the Hyperstructure,” which takes up the entire AEIVA lobby and atrium.
The event will feature a multisensory experience, including lights, music and video.
And the DAAH will host the opening for its 41st annual Juried Student Exhibition featuring works selected by Angel.
Angel will give a visiting artist lecture at 5 p.m. An opening reception is planned from 6-8 p.m. Both events are free and open to the public.
As a Colombian artist now based in New York, Angel had some help over the last 15 weeks in her installation of “Facing the Hyperstructure.”
“A group of UAB art students worked under my guidance to achieve the completion of the piece while meeting with me for weekly lectures where we studied futurism, perspective, projections and the understanding of the space in the realm of geometry and science,” Angel told Iron City Ink.
Angel said she enjoyed creating the installation and appreciated the strong support she received from AEIVA curator John Fields and other AEIVA and DAAH staff, but that didn’t make her job easy.
“The space itself was a complete challenge from the beginning of my proposal,” she said. “The building's intricate angles, curves and corners where difficult to assimilate. Finding a balanced dialogue between the building and the overall composition was like solving a really complex puzzle.”
Angel explained the title, and with it the conceptual and thematic underpinnings, of her large installation.
“I include the word ‘facing’ in the title because I want to give the audience, the visitor, a special place in the work,” Angel said. “ The piece is massive, and our presence inside it makes us feel somehow small, putting us in the place of observers, and inhabitants of it.”
“The word ‘hyperstructure’ relates to seeing the building as a solid construction, as a physical structure, that holds within it a series of educational interactions and intellectual relationships,” she said. “ I see these interactions as non physical structures, as network connections, as intangible structures. ‘Hyperstructure’ then means the accumulation of these layers of structure of different sorts.”
AEIVA warns attendees on its Facebook event page that the opening of the exhibit will include loud noise and constant changing lights in brightly colored spaces.
“Persons with light and noise sensitivity or photosensitive epilepsy should use caution when viewing this exhibition on opening night as some elements could trigger a seizure,” according to the post.
The Juried Student Exhibition, with work from 37 students, will be on display until April 14.
Angel’s work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally. For more information, go to jessicaangelarts.com.
AEIVA is located at 1221 10th Ave. South.
But wait… there’s more
Angel’s installation will be the setting for another aural experience, Chamber Music @ AEIVA, on Friday, April 7, with a reception at 5 p.m. and the concert at 5:30 p.m.
The event will be free and open to the public.
The musical performance, called “Air in a Loop,” will feature four new compositions written by members of the Birmingham Art Music Alliance.
The musicians are from the UAB Department of Music, the Alabama Symphony Orchestra and the Atlanta Opera.
For details, call 934-7376 or go to uab.edu/cas/music.
BlazerCon 2017
The Good Games UAB program will host its third annual BlazerCon at the Hill Student Center Ballroom from on Friday, March 31, from 3 p.m.-midnight, and Saturday, April 1, from 10 a.m.-6 p.m., according to a UAB news release.
The event, expected to draw about 500 people, will feature video-game tournaments, arcade cabinets, a screening of “Star Wars: Rogue One,” a cosplay contest, and artist and vendor booths.
The two-day gaming convention gives attendees chances to network with organizations on campus, as well as to participate in team-building activities and recreational events.
Admission for UAB students, faculty and staff is free. Two-day tickets for the public are $10.
A tribute to Harper
A women’s literary journal published each year by the UAB Department of English is being renamed in honor of an Alabama literary legend.
Poemmemoirstory, which contains poetry, short fiction and nonfiction written exclusively by women, will now be called Nelle -- a tribute to Pulitzer Prize winner Nelle Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird.
First published in 2000, the journal seeks to publish compelling, intellectually rigorous writing that represents a diverse range of women’s voices and experiences.
“We decided to change the name of the journal because some of the very best writing by women today sometimes blurs the boundaries between genres,” said Lauren Slaughter, assistant professor and editor-in-chief. “The journal is divided into three distinct sections: poems, memoirs and stories. We wanted to see what would happen when we allowed those distinctions to fade away in order to create a journal that moves seamlessly from piece to piece.”
The journal is distributed nationally and represents local, national and international authors.