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Photo by Erica Nesbitt, '09 |
Twenty years ago, artist Tom O'Day buried 30 artworks in a coffin outside Whitworth's former fine-arts building. This fall, he returned to campus for Exhume – an art dig that marked the transition from Whitworth's former
fine-arts building to the new, 20,000-square-foot Ernst F. Lied Center for the Visual Arts.
O'Day arrived at the dig in a limousine, accompanied by an accordion player and friends and family dressed in black. Black-and-white film footage from the burial ceremony in 1988 was projected on a screen, and candles lined the entrance to the site while smoke generated by a fog machine wafted out of the six-foot-deep hole. Of the 30 original works, 26 survived the 20-year stint underground. O'Day plans to reassemble the unearthed pieces over the winter for a spring exhibit at the Bryan Oliver Gallery at Whitworth.
O'Day, who is an instructor and art-gallery director at Spokane Falls Community College, makes art that deals with transition and the process of change; he has destroyed and transformed more than 300 works of art through processes that include immersion, axing, freezing, aerial ascent and explosions.
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