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Amour d’Armor: Fear, Fantasy, and Fashion in the New Age, which runs from Sunday, April 1- Sunday, May 13 in the Williams Center for the Arts gallery, explores the need for protection in modern society. An opening reception will take place 4:30-6:30 p.m. Sunday, April 1 in the Williams Center gallery.
Gallery hours are noon-5 p.m. Monday; 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday; 10 a.m.-8 p.m. Wednesday; 2 p.m.-5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday; and noon-5 p.m. the first Sunday of each month for First Weekend Easton. For more information, contact the gallery at (610) 330-5361, email, or visit the website.
In conjunction with the exhibit, Jeffrey L. Forgeng, professor of history at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and curator at the Higgins Armory Museum, will present the Carol P. Dorian ’79 Memorial Lecture in Art History 4:10 p.m. Tuesday, April 10 in the Williams Center, room 108. The lecture is entitled “Martial Arts of the Medieval Knight.”
The exhibit is curated by Bob Mattison, Metzgar Professor of Art, and Ida Sinkevic, associate professor of art.
In the quest for protection, contemporary inventors and artists alike have created wildly inventive devices for modern protection that fuse practicality, fantasy, paranoia, and fashion. This exhibit explores recent “armor,” from the fantastic to the practical, in a collection of objects that reveal the obsessions of the age.
“The exhibition explores the need for armor as a means of protection in non-military spheres of our own society,” says Sinkevic. “More precisely, it draws upon the never-ending popularity of the myth of medieval knights and their armor and explores how that myth has been transformed by the need for protection from a wide variety of agents by artists of our own age. It will present the Lafayette community with an excellent opportunity to examine artistic responses to a wide range of dangers, real or imagined, and to witness a series of widely inventive devices.”
The exhibition includes manufactured objects that address some of the dangers of contemporary times, including the “Neptunic C Sharksuit” to protect divers from sharks; a dirt bike helmet; and the portable “ChemBio Shelter”which can be quickly inflated to protect the inhabitants from chemical or biological agents. The “ChemBio Shelter” was developed by Ed Roscioli, in response to what he felt was an inadequate suggestion on the part of Homeland Security to stock plastic and duct tape. Angie Waller examines the car armoring business in her video, “Armored Cars: Protecting Yourself from Ballistic Attacks.”
Tobias Wong’s “Ballistic Rose Brooch”is a piece of jewelry – a flower made of ballistic nylon – to protect the heart of the wearer. Ralph Borland’s “Suited for Subversion”(2002) is padded to protect its wearer during street protests and is based on protective garb actually worn by Italian protestors. Bill Burn also presents his series of“Safety Gear for Small Animals.”
“Burn’s work plays on our natural love for small furry creatures and our interest in miniatures. Our first response of whimsical disbelief about the miniature work gloves and safety gogglesleads us to more serious questions about deforestation and environmental pollution as well as other ecological and social concerns,” says Mattison.
Sinkevic, who curated Knights in Shining Armor: Myth and Reality, 1450-1650 for the Allentown Art museum, recognizes the ongoing interest in armor throughout the ages.
“Lafayette’s exhibition is organized to complement the exhibition that I have curated for the Allentown Art Museum, Knights in Shining Armor, thus providing continuity to the subject of armor by illuminating its never ending appeal for artists of our own age,” she says.
Mattison believes the exhibit explores both the fantasy and reality of armor in this modern era.
“This exhibition captures both the fantasies and fears of the post-9/11 generation. It is tied to our contemporary history and how we view our age,” say Mattison. “The exhibition combines fashion, engineering, and art. Often we cannot tell which objects are intended for practical use and which are artistic tropes,” he says.
The Williams Center gallery is funded in part by a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a state agency funded by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.