Kirsten Stromberg's '94 Senior Fellowship Award exhibition, titled, "Double Diamond Hitch," uses sight and sound, integrating music and art through sound sculpture, and prerecorded electroacoustic sound pickups attached to music. These haunting images draw people towards the Jaffe-Friede and Strauss Galleries at the Hopkins Center where the exhibition will be held until August 18.
The integration of animal and humanlike forms throughout the installation emphasizes that for all of our technological, social and biological advancements, we share similar characteristics with animals we perceive as inferior.
Unfortunately, it is through the means of coercion and cruelty that we 'bond' with these animals in the process of domesticating them for our own purposes.
Stromberg reveals the different perspectives involved in the act of harnessing and domesticating animals and conveys her interest with the process of somehow transcending the state of being harnessed (and in turn harnessing), along with recognizing the struggles and sources of power it involves.
She integrates sound with her pieces that provides a whole new dimension to the sensual and mysterious forms in the installation.
Stromberg writes that animals "are a harsh realization of exactly how far we humans have come from our own connections to the natural world ... they are unabashedly sexual and physical." In this installation, she achieves this feeling of perversion in the beautification of her pieces, rather ironic in such setting.
Particular attention is paid to the implements used such as harnesses and yokes and the amount of movement allowed to an animal under restraint. Most of her pieces are rather disturbing though elegant and provocative.
Stromberg's installation leaves you with several impressions -- awe, confusion, inspiration, revulsion, and admiration. "The use of space and sound and texture delights and intrigues me," Allison Moll '95 said.Stromberg's ability to transmit such feelings is an indication of her success with her installation.
"I'm using the metaphors of harnesses and domesticated animals to help focus my understanding of myself and the world around me," she said.
As you walk through the installation you encounter many peculiar works.
The installation is set up like a maze, providing a sudden encounter with pieces that are strange, wonderful and disturbing because they are identifiable as being both human and animalistic and can be manipulated to emit sounds when handled.
One wooden piece, carved to represent a human leg and a horse's leg with a bell attached to the end, is shocking to view.
The image is of a twisted form, with open humanlike legs displayed in mid-air with several ropes pulling the figure in many directions, evokes an immediate feeling of agony and suffering. But at the same time, it is a beautiful form in our distorted minds.
Stromberg's work is both powerful and delightful to look at and touch. She leaves us with thefeeling the representational symbols serve as not just breaking and socializing animals but human beings as well.
Stromberg graduated from the College with a Senior Fellow credit instead of her double majors in music and studio art.
"Trying to convey what I feel is one of the most exciting things about art," she said. "Something honest inevitably gets out."
"What happens if we can integrate our natural and societal selves?" Stromberg asks frequently in her work.
Stromberg said she is moving to San Francisco in September to wait tables and work on grant applications. In two years, she plans on going to South Africa with a troupe of artists to work and travel around the country. Stromberg intends to go to graduate school, either in art or music.
