The visual and dramatic arts (VADA) students, staff and faculty who put together this semester’s ON/OFF exhibition promised that the show — a series of sculpture gardens across campus featuring student work primarily from Lisa Lapinski’s sculpture studio classes — would be as accessible as possible for remote students.
And they meant it, as one VADA student found when she entered her piece in the show all the way from Minnesota.
Martel College sophomore Ling DeBellis has been attending classes online from her home in Minneapolis, including Lapinski’s beginning sculpture course. All semester, Lapinski has shipped materials to DeBellis that allow her to participate in hands-on projects with the same supplies as her classmates on campus.
“Which is amazing,” said DeBellis, who’s also double-majoring in ecology and evolutionary biology. “It’s incredible — really making online learning hands-on and making it the best it can be.”
For a class competition to enter pieces in ON/OFF, which ran through Oct. 31, DeBellis used some of those materials to make a small model of her idea for an election-related sculpture: a satirical take on the voting booth that took the form of an outhouse, complete with crescent moon-shaped window, based on childhood memories of her grandfather’s cabin and its outdoor facilities in the north woods of Minnesota.
Her entry, “Grandpa Kemper’s Outhouse,” was selected for the show and DeBellis was able to watch it take shape from afar as it was constructed in the Cloisters outside the Rice Memorial Center thanks to Lapinski and the VADA team.
“Ryan Crowley, Lisa’s shop assistant, built another model from my model, and then from that model he built a life-sized structure of it,” DeBellis said.
DeBellis was elated to see a piece she created at home become real halfway across the country, and hoped that visitors who interact with the politically-minded sculpture would find the playfulness in it.
“I was like, let’s do something that’s gonna make people laugh,” DeBellis said. “It’s mostly to be for fun and add a little humor to the election.”