Professor Joyce Lyon’s “St. Paul Garden II” | 2014 | oil stick on board
By Cora Hyun Jung/Murphy News Service
“The Longest Way Round is the Shortest Way Home,”an exhibit currently at the Katherine E. Nash Gallery, celebrates the artistic careers of two retiring University of Minnesota professors, James Henkel and Joyce Lyon.
Henkel joined the U faculty in the photography department in 1976. Lyon came aboard as a drawing and painting instructor in 1983.. Both will retire after spring semester, and the exhibit is a way to celebrate their legacies as highly regarded educators.
The title of the exhibit, which runs through March 28, came from the excerpt of famous Irish novel, “Ulysses.”
“Coincidentally, their first names (James Henkel and Joyce Lyon) together form the name of the Irish writer James Joyce,” Howard Oransky, the director of the Nash gallery, said. Oransky said the title of the exhibit comes from his novel “Ulysses,” which reads, … Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home. …”
Henkel said he has always been interested in “constructing a relationship between beauty and function” He said photographs of objects can be read within a social, historical, political or intimate context because things in the world that interact with us are freighted with meanings.
“It is the relationship between objects and how we understand them that interests me,” Henkel wrote.
Professor James Henkel’s “Apple Branch” | 2006 |
His images drift into the viewer’s imagination, giving them a chance to find new revelations about one’s relationship to the everyday world.
Lyon engages the world through specific places, such as a known garden, a forest, or a village. Capturing an experience of a physical place through an act of drawing, she translates the dimension of time into sight.
“I work from observation, with emotion and an acute sense of the layering of time,” she said.
“The exhibition is special for many reasons,” Oransky said. “But one in particular is that while these two artists are showing together coincidentally, because of their retirement schedules, there is nevertheless a shared esthetic sensibility in the work and in the gallery exhibition.”
Reporter Cora Hyun Jung is studying journalism at the University of Minnesota.
IF YOU GO
What: The Longest Way Round is the Shortest Way Home Exhibit
When: Tuesday, Feb. 24. – Saturday, March 28.
Hours: 11:00 a.m. – 7:00 p.m.
Where: Katherine E. Nash Gallery, 405 21st Ave. S., Minneapolis, MN 55455
Admission: Free
For more information: Contact 612-624-7530 or [email protected]