Fiber artist displays works at NCC
North Central College will showcase works by fiber installation artist Jan-Ru Wan in the exhibit “ReMaterialization/Relive Memory” Jan. 11 to March 24.
The exhibit is free and open to the public in the college’s Schoenherr Gallery at the Fine Arts Center, 171 E. Chicago Ave., Naperville. An artist reception will be from 6 to 8 p.m. Friday, Jan. 11; complimentary refreshments will be served.
Wan uses such materials as petri dishes, threads, red chili pepper, rice, feathers, seaweed, white fungus, old clothes and more to express in abstract form the many concepts of emotion, memory, life and death.
“The appearance and disappearance of dream, desire, hope, despair and life are transient: one moment you realize they are all there, and the next moment you may just go on with your everyday life without even noticing them,” Wan says.
After the loss of his father, Wan wanted to reconstruct the moment of her father holding his children, having his whole life ahead of him, dreaming about his life and family and working hard toward that goal.
“This loss is real, yet it also seems so abstract and distant from reality for me,” Wan says. “As memories come and fade into distance, I question myself in this exhibition the emotional construct of human life.”
After working as a fashion designer in her native Taipei, Taiwan, Wan moved to the United States to study fiber art and sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago. She earned a master’s degree in fine arts from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Wan has appeared in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and internationally.
For gallery hours or to learn more about the exhibit, contact Nickole C. Lanham, North Central’s gallery director, at (630) 637-5375 or ">nclanhammurray@noctrl.edu