Interdisciplinary Artwork at RIT: Panel Discussion and Exhibit Reception Tonight

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Sarah Newman

This image was made in the northern Peruvian Amazon in January 2011.

RIT’s Center for Student Innovation inaugurates a rotating gallery with an exhibit featuring the artwork of graduate students Virginia Pfau and Sarah Newman.

In addition to the exhibit, a panel discussion “Between Rivers: Interdisciplinary Artwork at RIT” is at 5 p.m. today in the Center for Student Innovation. A reception will immediately follow.

Pfau, a graduate student in the School for American Crafts ceramics program, explores the growing concern in society, across the arts and sciences, to understand our imprint on the environment. Her installations combine clay and plastics symbolic of earth and technology. Photography masters student Sarah Newman traveled to the Amazon jungle and her images explore the nature of nature, the human tendency to alter the natural world and photography’s capacity to both contribute to and re-present this process.

Pfau and Newman, along with Timothy Engstrom, RIT professor of philosophy; Christine Shank, RIT professor of photography; and Richard Hirsch, ceramics professor in RIT’s School for American Crafts, will participate in a panel discussion that looks at how art might help us understand our relationships to the natural world and how sculpture, photography, environmental philosophy, packaging science and technology might collaborate and be connected.

The exhibit runs through Sept. 21.