Sac State showcases professors? artworks

The artworks of Sacramento State professors and photographers Nigel Poor and Doug Rice will be on display until Dec. 9 in the Robert Else Gallery, located in Kadema Hall.

Art history professor Elaine O'Brien said the art department is exhibiting the artwork of Poor and Rice because they are both exceptional artists whose works are widely admired.

Poor's photography is described as conceptual, objective and with an absurdist edge. She portrays the intersections of daily life by using items such as dead flies on a windowsill, or the clothes dryer felt one would find after a few loads of laundry, O'Brien said.

Rice's photography combines texts and is described as deeply poetic and on the brink of sentiment. O'Brien described his work as photo-textual work that extends his dedicated search for the perfect world into visual fields.

Laila Barakat can be reached at lbarakat@statehornet.com.

Finding inspiration from unexpected places

By Micah Stevenson

Instead of throwing her trash away, Sacramento State design professor Nigel Poor has made a career out of it.

"What interests me is looking at the things that most people would discard or consider to be garbage or insignificant, and try to find the relevance of them," Poor said. "Humor is also a part of what I do."

Poor said "287 Flies," a photographed collection of dead houseflies she gathered in a year, was the most difficult of her projects to complete.

"I started it in 2002 and finished it this year, so I just have a really long relationship with it and kept reworking it and its ideas," Poor said. "It was the first project I had that tackled my issues with digital photography. I was doing analog photography for 20 years, and then all of a sudden I had to start learning this new process. I hate learning new technology, but as a teacher I have to be up on all of it. It was a technical, but awarding challenge."

"287 Flies" is also Poor's favorite of her works because of its theme of mortality.

"It's the one and only thing we're guaranteed to experience," Poor said. "At some time, we will die, and we don't know what that means and what will happen to us. I guess it interests me because it's an essential part of being human. It's a mystery that we can never answer, and yet there's so much there to ponder about."

Her other projects in Sacramento State's Robert Else Gallery are "Tiny Writing," "Thought Lines," and "Do You Have 30 Seconds and Can Get Your Finger Dirty?" These projects focus on overlooked concepts such as background noise, individual fingerprints and thought processes during simple actions.

"I like the idea of using beauty as a way to get people to look at things and think about issues," Poor said. "I'm just trying to figure out how we exist, how we interact in life, and I'm very interested in people. I'm very nosy; I like to know people's secrets. I like to know what makes them tick. If I weren't an artist, I would like to be a therapist."

Poor considers teaching an excellent career choice because it gives students the opportunity to learn from her artwork while she gains artistic inspiration from them.

"I hope students can see the importance of working hard and really concentrating on what you're fascinated with and doing things that maybe other people might not think are the most accepted way of working with something," she said. "The flies, for example, are a creature that so many people find vile, but the idea that you can look to them as inspiration is great. So a lot of what I do is for myself, and a lot of that then is transferred to the classroom. It's a reciprocal process."

Poor said while her friends, family and teaching are important to her, working in her studio is what keeps her going.

"There's something about working in my studio that allows me to divest myself of things that are difficult," Poor said. "I love it; it gives my life meaning. It gives me a reason to get up in the morning."

Micah Stevenson can be reached at mstevenson@statehornet.com.

Combining visual art with creative writing

By Laila Barakat

English and film studies professor Doug Rice used to be the "entertaining" kid who told stories and made people laugh; the stories he now tells through his artwork make people think about the world around them.

At quick glance, Rice's works appear to be photographs with text written on them.

However, there is more to it than that.

Rice describes his artwork as work that challenges boundaries, explores beauty, love and politics in an unobtrusive way.

"(My) work is work that challenges our identities and re-imagines the everyday through a poetic lens that makes possible new desires," he said. "It is political art in a way that does not appear political. I feel the most profound political act is to re-imagine love and beauty and to transform our daily lives."

His inspirations lie with his desire to tell his stories through his artwork &- stories one cannot live without telling and stories that "burn in your heart," he said.

"I have a deep desire to be sure I am the one to tell my stories because I know if I do not, then others will tell them for me, over my way of telling," Rice said. "My inspiration is (also) a way to critique capitalism, which merely wants us to consume and believe in their false myths."

Rice's passion extends beyond art and into the realm of creative writing, where storytelling is a part of not only his artwork, but also of who he is as a person.

When he was an undergraduate student at Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania, Rice recalls his professor criticizing a short story he wrote about outcast characters, who were a bit different and on the fringes of society.

"He told me not to write about those kinds of people. That no one cared about them," Rice said. "I said I cared. I (then) thought, "This is the answer. I care.'"

He has authored short fiction stories and novels such as "Blood of Mugwump: A Tiresian Tale of Incest," "Skin Prayer" and "A Good Cuntboy is Hard to Find."

His first novel, "Blood of Mugwump: A Tiresian Tale of Incest," has been awarded runner-up for the Fiction Collective First Novel Award, judged by novelist and punk-poet Kathy Acker.

Rice finds the most frustrating part of the artistic process is finding time during the semester to "create."

"Some days I can only find 10 minutes in the corner to write. I steal it ... I want it. To have those moments, if only 10 minutes, is worth it," he said. "But art does not frustrate me; it opens me."

Rice encourages students to come to the exhibit because he feels art should surprise their way of thinking and believing.

"Students should view any artwork in order to discover new ways for seeing the world, experiencing and reflecting on their own lives and desires," he said. "Art should unnerve (one's) own ontology (sense of being)."

Laila Barakat can be reached at lbarakat@statehornet.com.