Objectivity

 OBJECT Project is a traveling art exhibition featuring fifteen contemporary realists who all focused on the same five objects: a clear glass of water, a moth, a ball of string, a bone, and a mirror. The point was to see how each artist would interpret the five items, and the results bring together a vast repertoire of varying ideas and insinuations, from playful and colorful to dark and hidden, from symbolic to whimsical, dreary to strange.

Organized by the Evansville Museum of Arts, History and Science in Indiana, the show has already been to South Carolina, Oklahoma and Tennessee. Its final stop is at the Museum of Outdoor Arts in Englewood.

“The artists were all given a list of objects and asked to select the ones that inspired them the most,” says Tatum Hayes, the MOA’s administrative director. “It’s really quite interesting that, across the board, the artists selected these five.” Both transcendent and fiercely individual, OBJECT Project opens today at 9 a.m. at the museum, 1000 Englewood Parkway. Tomorrow, more than half of the artists — who are coming from around the country — are expected to take part in a panel discussion beginning at 4:30 p.m.; a reception follows at 6. In addition, other works by some of the artists involved will be displayed in the museum’s atrium.

Admission is free; for more information, call 303-806-0444 or go to www.moaonline.org.
Feb. 20-May 23, 2009