Ouachita Stories

Ouachita Baptist University’s Hammons Gallery will host Kell Black and Barry Jones in a guest exhibit from Jan. 12-28. The multimedia art exhibit will feature aspects of Black and Jones’ “Please Call Stella” piece.

The artists will hold a closing reception and artists’ talk on Jan. 28 in Hammons Gallery, which is located in Ouachita’s Mabee Fine Arts Center. The reception will also include a live audio visual performance by Black and Jones. The time of the reception is to be announced.

“This is a unique exhibition because it involves video, music, typography and sound—something new for the department—very post-modern and very experimental,” said David Bieloh, associate professor of graphic design and chair of the department of visual art at Ouachita. “To my knowledge,” he continued, “this would be a unique exhibition not only for OBU, but for the area in general.”

“Please Call Stella” was inspired by the speech accent archives compiled by Dr. Steven H. Weinberger of George Mason University. Weinberger and his team recorded thousands of native and non-native English speakers reading a short narrative paragraph that contains all of the sounds in the English language, beginning with the words “Please call Stella.”

The scene is set,” explain Black and Jones in their artist statement, “for a story that never progresses but is stuck forever in time, endlessly repeated by people from all over the world.”

Self-described collage theorists Black and Jones seek to use techniques of digital sound and video editing—both in the studio and in live performances—to explore “all the ways in which media intersect and interact to create new languages expressive of our time.” They work to create new works from both existing and original media.

The duo has exhibited both their solo and collaborative work in galleries and festivals in Europe, Australia and South America as well as across the United States.

Kell Black, currently a professor of art at Austin Peay State University (APSU) in Clarksville, Tenn., holds a bachelor of arts degree in music and German from the State University of New York, College at Fredonia. He also studied harpsichord and Baroque performance practice at the Wiener Hochschule für Musik in Vienna, Austria, and holds a master of fine arts degree in sculpture and drawing from the University of Connecticut, Storrs.

Barry Jones, currently an associate professor of art at APSU, holds a bachelor of fine arts degree in photography from APSU. He earned his master of fine arts degree in three-dimensional studies from the University of South Carolina.

For more information about Black and Jones, visit their Web site at www.blackandjones.net.

by Brooke Showalter, OBU Assistant Director of Communications