Thandie Brown
Staff Writer
Broward College students should expect to see their work featured on South Campus within the Art Gallery this Summer 2019.
South Florida based Installation artist, Leandra Arvazzetti, lead the final South Campus STEAM event mid-March featuring pictures of her labor-intensive, eye-catching artwork.
Each chair was filled, and every corner was occupied by the time the North Campus, 2D Design Professor began her lecture in the Art Gallery. She showed art students, faculty, and visitors her successes in material manipulation from the digital and physical structures of dresses to sculptures made of construction material.
Influenced by her heritage, Arvazzetti’s Cuban and Peruvian roots are presented in her creations where she further shared the shifts within her artwork. From dresses that mirrored more of her in frame/style, her work, “became its own,” with small-scale and then very largely scaled construction sculptures that went beyond Arvazzetti’s immediate being.
“There is an oversaturation of stuff you could play with,” she says and where you can still see the influences of her textile and seam stressing, Peruvian heritage and of her carpenter, Cuban heritage, the artwork Arvazzetti produces has, “representations of her, but also [presents itself] as [construction] sites or environments.”
She says her artwork talks about herself, but it also shows how the materials found in a male-dominated industry can take on a more feminine design like when chicken wire is woven with bright fabrics or when green turf scales up a column like a vine.
Arvazzetti notes that the evolution and the idea of change are her current inspirations as well as the recent works of Nick Carpe and El Anatsui. With change her creations are upcycled so they take on new forms in each exhibit.
Bringing her audience from a visual lecture to a physical workshop, she unrolled enough chicken wire to cover the entire studio art room in Building 71.
Students were able to weave, crease, mold and fray threads as long or as short as they wanted into the piece creating an extended collage. The constant tears of fabrics and rips of seams, even the overlapping gestures of hands and quieter whispers of the passing of blue or yellow strips, were all vital steps in the grand design.
Arvazzetti announced her inclusion of this workshop piece as a part of her exhibit this Summer 2019, but also left her audience wanting as she mentioned possible creations that are featured on smaller, dollhouse scales.
Natalie Ortega, undecided South Campus attendee, came for the extra credit available in her Art Appreciation class held by, Lorna Galloway, but says she leaves, “more intrigued,” than when she came. Sharing a Peruvian background with Arvazzetti, she noticed Arvazzetti’s use of the Inca flag, the Flag of Cusco, and how its material features rainbow colors that are seen throughout Arvazzetti’s artwork.
Also collaborating with Lorna Galloway, Arvazzetti and the expansion of her work lets the structure created at her STEAM event that much more valuable.
Professor Jonatas Chimen pointed out that this allows those who participated to add the collaboration to their portfolios.
For more information about Leandra Arvazzetti, check out her website at http://www.leandraarvazzetti.com/, or email her at larvezze@broward.edu.
browt175@mail.broward.edu
Photo: Centered Leandra Arvazzetti demonstrating to students their possible creations. Thandie Brown/The Observer