The Hampden Gallery at The University of Massachusetts Amherst offers students a touch of culture and creative thinking in an area of campus one might not usually expect to find it - the Southwest residential area.
Currently at the gallery there is a showing of “The Pawn Shop - Fox Proprietors” by the Provincetown-based artists Tim Winn and Zehra Khan. The interactive exhibit will be displayed at the gallery from now and until Oct. 6.
As you walk into the gallery it is clear that the artists have created their own small world. The main focus point is a pawn shop constructed from paper and paint that visitors can walk through and interact with. Every piece is life-size and even available for purchase.
They have created a space where children can feel just as comfortable as adults, but there is also some creative and critical thinking that needs to be done when one views this seemingly lighthearted take on a pawn shop managed by foxes. “It can reveal a lot more than what one can just see with their eyes,” said Anne LaPrade, the gallery's director, “It would be wrong to look at the work as just casual or playful.”
The story behind the pawn shop is that a visitor walks in and notices that the proprietors, the foxes, are not there. Anything can happen inside the store, LaPrade explained, and the artists are trying to ask “when nobody is around, do your values change?”
But this exhibit is not just about social and moral values. “I would say that it is a fitting exhibit for the time… because people are looking at their pocket books. It is useful for people to look at an exhibit like this and exercise their thoughts about the situation” LaPrade said, adding that the work of art also hints towards the current economic situation.
“Visitors to pawn shops are often not wealthy people,” LaPrade said, A pawn shop "is a place that you go when things are pretty hard. There is an element of desperation.”
In contrast to this element of desperation, there is a video playing in a two minute loop in the back of the gallery showing the artists dressed in colorful body paint acting as the fox proprietors making it clear that they are not experiencing any monetary hardship at all. In fact, there is also a “Secret Tunnel” that visitors can walk through to gain entrance to a secret vault that contains piles of “Fox Money.”
The two artists drew all the items that are in the shop with a kind of makeshift feel to them. They were all hand painted as small pictures then copied and enlarged to make them life-sized. Also, everything comes with a price tag. Visitors have the option of buying any copy of the art.
Artists Winn and Khan both hold MFA’s from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and they say that they would like to take their work as far as they can go.
Thom Konan who works for the gallery says “I really appreciate folk art. I look forward to seeing more from these artists… it’s got an interesting sort of edge to it.”
Journalism major, and one of the gallery visitors Patrick Strohecker, said of the exhibit that “It can relate to the college kids because we are always strapped for cash… and it’s different because it’s not just pretty paintings.”
A limited, digital copy of the artists’ book about their exhibit can be found at http://www.blurb.com/books/2437713
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