FARMINGTON – An unusual reception at the Emery Community Arts Center Thursday evening will feature a gigantic lung-like balloon, modified bicycle helmets and clawed shoes and artists wearing their work, as a group of students brings the Prosthesis Project show to life.
The Prosthesis Project’s closing reception is Thursday, Dec. 12, from 5 to 8 p.m. Monday afternoon, Jesse Potts, a University of Maine at Farmington assistant professor of art, and his students were hard at work with glue guns and cardboard “smooshers” in the ECAC’s flex space, preparing vast sections of plastic for arrangement and hanging. The dome-like tent, approximately 60-feet in diameter and inflated with an air blower, will provide a peculiar sort of space for a peculiar sort of show.
“There’s an expectation, as a student in a sculptor class, that you’ll make a discrete object,” Potts said. “Something you can hold and walk around.” Interested in breaking that mold, Potts assigned his students a new project: develop something they could wear, something that either replaced or enhanced an existing function.
“Some are practical, some are fanciful,” Potts said. “Some are more like theater props.” Two students’ takes on the flight, for example, yielded a pair of enormous, brightly-colored wings and a pair of sandals mounted on sets of springs.
Other concepts range from the use of mirrors to grant either distorted or improved ranges of vision, wrist-mounted containers and a retractable beard.
Students will be donning their creations Thursday, ushering viewers through the inflatable globe, based off a parabolic curve and itself an imitation of a lung or other breathing organ. Potts plans to have a blower inflate the globe, with a doorman bringing people inside.
The closing reception will be held on Thursday, Dec. 12 from 5 to 8 p.m.
