Summer Arts Academy: Stuck on duct tape
The connection between duct tape and art might not be immediately clear to the average person, and Summer Arts Academy students evidently found the issue a sticky one as they designed their own "fashions" for an end-of-the-course show held recently in the Edwards Courtyard.Parents, siblings and curious onlookers (including media) gathered to view and cheer on "Hollywood Duct Tape Costumes," a parade of 11 costumes the kids designed and modeled. Students also wrote and performed a script to introduce the outfit on the courtyard "catwalk." (The "Chuckie" team never made it to the catwalk since the student model got hot and ripped her costume off.)
Art professor Susan Slavik led the group of 38 students through a 14-day residential art program that culminated in the duct tape fashions and an art exhibition of some 200 works in the Rebecca Randall Bryan Gallery. It was Slavik's eighth year of putting on a duct tape show, but the ninth year it has been held.
"It's a good way to integrate performance art with individual artmaking," says Slavik. "It's also a good collaborative project for them. They spend an awful lot of time working on individual projects, but the workplace today puts value on collaborative efforts and working in teams."
Taylor Monahan as Tweedle Dum and Katherine Click as Tweedle Dee were wearing orange and yellow duct tape costumes over waffle mattress foam around their middles. "I am sweating so hard," said one of them as they were interviewed by a videographer from "Not the News," which airs on WFXB FOX 43. The two girls are "best friends" and wanted to do something together. "We were thinking Siamese twins, but didn't want to be attached."
The colorful bird Kevin from the Pixar movie "Up" was another popular costume, worn by Ella Bergdoll-Oberhammer, led around by "little bird" Lexi Lutsky and announced by Rob Sheehan's daughter Mary. The girls went through lots of blue, yellow and orange duct tape.
Minnie Mouse, worn by Kristen Hollander, a rising high school senior, was also an innovative duct tape costume of a red-and-white polka dotted dress, complete with white duct tape petticoats, duct tape yellow shoes and white tape gloves.
Other costumes included: the Corpse Bride; a Slytherin student from "Harry Potter"; a man from "Men in Black"; Esmerelda the gypsy from "The Hunchback of Notre Dame"; The White Queen from "The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe"; "Thing Two" from Dr. Seuss' "The Cat in the Hat"; and Mrs. Lovett from "Sweeney Todd."
After the show, many of the costumes had to be cut off with scissors, Slavik says.
