"Rock, paper, scissors!"
You can hear these words chanted by children on playgrounds everywhere. Now, they're also the title of the Noyes Cultural Arts Center's latest exhibition.
"Rock Paper Scissors" held an opening reception Saturday as part of Arts Week Evanston. The exhibition, which features the work of six artists, opened Sept. 18 and will be on display until Nov. 11.
Despite the childlike name, the artists' interpretations of the theme were hardly juvenile.
"I like the whole idea of paper and rocks being related to the Earth and scissors being related to man and man's power in relation to the world around us," said Eleanor Boyer, an Evanston resident.
The idea for the theme came to Chie Curley, the show's co-curator, about two years ago.
"It just kind of hung around in the back of my mind," she said. "It really took finding the artists to make me feel, 'All right, we do have a show.'"
The art was meant to interpret the "rock, paper, scissors" theme in creative ways, so each piece conveys a different message.
Agnieszka Jachymczyk's "In Memory" began as a reaction piece to the deaths of her two grandmothers.
The work, which depicts intricate images of Polish and American cemeteries cut from tissue paper, represents the scissors theme.
"This was a very therapeutic way of getting over the emotions," Jachymczyk said.
Jachymczyk, who was born in Poland, found inspiration for the piece when she returned to her native country for the burials and saw marked differences between Polish and American funeral culture.
"The cemeteries are darker. They're much more packed with gravestones," she said. "It started to intrigue me, visually, the difference between here and there."
The piece became a collaborative effort.
"I would do the drawings and indicate which areas had to be cut out and then the entire family would sit around the table and we would do the cutouts together," she said.
In some of the images, she also included female family members.
"We are basically the memory keepers," she said. "The minute we die, the people that we remember die with us."
The final installation took a year to complete and contained 113 panels. Nine of those are on display as part of the scissors aspect of the exhibition.
Saturday's reception also featured performance art.
Chicago-based multimedia artist Michael Montenegro, whose rock and scissor sculptures were part of the exhibition, put on two puppet shows with his marionette, Saldania.
"We tend to be a society of isolated individuals," he said. "There's something very ancient and communal about puppet theater."
At the time he created the puppet, Montenegro wanted to be a storyteller like his grandfather.
"But I realized at 18 that I didn't have the weight of personality of an old person to tell stories, so I built this marionette, and it seemed to work," he said.
The shows, which took place in the middle of the gallery, caught several visitors' attention.
"I found the puppet intriguing," said Brian Mahaffy, a visitor at the exhibition. "The detail of the movement when he was doing the show was great, especially the attention to gestures were close to being humanlike."
Zeke Williams' installation, "Husk," depicts a floating dining room made of handmade paper.
"A dining room is mostly what I regard to be a place of consumption, communion and communication," Williams said. "Our consumption is extremely fragile. It's supported by very limited and diminishing resources."
His piece is one of several with an ecological message.
"One of the things I find as a theme in the works is the idea that we need to be good stewards of our environment and treat it with reverence and care," Boyer said.
ltakenaga@u.northwestern.edu
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