Gregg Schlanger Lcture Review

             Gregg gave us a rundown of, well, basically his life, and walked us through the different art projects that he has done over the years. Some of his themes are the local environment, fish (because he loves fishing), water, and glass. He mostly makes his art pieces as installations in galleries but then will also occasionally do larger scale public projects.

            He’s built several waterway structures/sculptures that sort of encompass themes of the situation of water of the surrounding environment. He mostly uses wood, and makes a lot different moving pieces. His most well known waterworks were New England Waters, New England Dreams where he built a giant wooden sculpture next to a lake that moved water up out of the lake and then back into it at the end of the sculpture. Another water work sculpture that he built was for the City of Reno, when he lived here, in City Hall. It was during a drought in the Reno Tahoe area so it was a sensitive piece but he used a lot of wood and metal and the piece as a whole resembled the old mining contraptions. It was a piece that was perfect for the location.

            Probably my favorite piece of Gregg’s was his Prairie Dreams where he tried to recreate the environment of past Northern Iowa within a gallery space. Northern Iowa used to be full of very tall grass, so Schlanger suspended tables with soil in which he planted the tall grass seeds. He then rigged a way for water to softly rain from above the grass. He also built a nice bench with a tilted tin roof where the “rain” would softly patter and then drizzle in front of the people at the bench. It looked like a truly beautiful project that I would have loved to have witnessed in person.

Farflung Show Review

Farflung was a very, very interesting play. First off, the audience was in the middle, which is already completely original. The audience was in four rows of two facing each other in a square, with separate stages placed behind each section of the audience. This made you, as an audience member feel very exposed and almost uncomfortable because not only could the other audience members look at you, around you, and past you at the actors, but also when the actors moved around behind you and near you.

The play also you used another medium along with the typically devices of plays: actors, costumes, props, and stages. But they also used four projectors that projected images onto the walls behind each of the four sections of the audience. The projectors projected previously filmed images of the actors in different environments using a green-screen. This allowed the actors to go into what I believed was sort of a ‘dream-state’ where the screens showed the characters dreams, or sometimes different themes that had to do with the­m at that moment.

            Even though you could argue that having the audience in the middle was a form of breaking the fourth wall, especially when towards the end the actors finally moved into the middle of the audience, they also attempted to do one other way. Near the middle, when it appeared as the projetors were showing the wrong videos one of the actors yelled in his real voice (he was using an accent in the play) up to the control booth, where the technical person opened the window and yelled back something along the lines of don’t worry I’m fixing it. It was a strange way to break the fourth wall, and I wasn’t very impressed with it. It seemed like a way to break the fourth wall just for the sake of breaking it.