Welcome

Current Exhibitions

In the Holzhauer Gallery

Selections from the Sublette New Guinea Collection

In 1994, Alvah T. Sublette, Jr. of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, donated the 300-piece New Guinea “Primitive” Art Collection to Okaloosa-Walton Community College.  Sublette and his wife, Betty, had been world travelers for years and amassed an extensive collection of folk arts and traditional crafts on their visits to Europe, Central America, the South Pacific, and Asia.

All items in the collection were obtained in the Sepik River region of Papua New Guinea or from sites along the Gulf of Papua.  They were created from wood and decorated with natural materials (plant and animal products), and colored with natural dyes and pigments like charcoal, lime, and ochre.  The range of objects in the collection is spectacular; life-size (or larger) figures, hooks and bowls, tools, instruments, masks, jewelry, and shields are but a few of the objects represented, nearly all of which would have been used in a ritual or spiritual context.

Alvah Sublette donated his New Guinea Collection in memory of his wife, Betty Sublette and their son, Oliver T. Sublette, who both died in 1991.  During his lifetime, Oliver had worked as an artist and a drama coach with the New Guinea National Theatre, and had helped his parents amass their impressive collection as he recorded stories and local histories in the remote wilds of New Guinea.

In the McIlroy Gallery

‘unlike approaching a canyon by Clint Sleeper and Terri Lindbloom’

This exhibition of works strives to investigate the interwoven relationships between materials, digital systems, sound, and the human body. In these experimental steel sculptures, unconventional instruments, and large-scale installations, Terri Lindbloom and Clinton Sleeper draw parallels between the stature and role of the body in the contemporary moment against the poetics and possibilities of materials drawn from the earth. Here a digital choreography reduces chakra frequencies traditionally associated with balancing the body and spirit (of the human sort), into physical vibrations and mechanical noise. Employing transducer speakers and handmade electronics, those balancing frequencies fail to translate into industrial materials or gallery space, we are made to feel distant from the work and unbalanced in our bodies. Within this failed translation we are asked to consider those relationships existing between materials and industry, between technology and bodies.