Halsey Exhibition Reveals The Naked Truth

“Is it all clothes?”

The question buzzed between students, faculty and art aficionados on the second floor of the Halsey Institute Sunday night.

The opening reception for the Faculty Spotlight gallery exhibition, featuring the work of C of C faculty, Loul Samater and Jarod Charzewski, challenged and delighted observers with two strikingly sizeable installations that explore the uses and abuses of discarded material.

While Samater uses the gallery’s first floor space to examine the duality between participation and observation with her installation, Diving Dunce, the audience energy seemed to swarm around the exhibition upstairs.

Visiting C of C Studio Art instructor, Jarod Charzewski has spent the last month buried in the Halsey carefully folding and layering massive amounts of shirts, jeans, sweaters, and handbags to create a landscape like no other.

His installation, Scarp, takes the familiarity and luxury of clothing and forces it to reveal the realities of human waste. Layers upon layers of discarded clothing, once necessary objects to someone, seem to mock mass production and materialism, taking up a seemingly large space that would otherwise fill a landfill. The massive amount of clothing used for the project is currently on loan from the Goodwill Industries of South Carolina and carries a shock value of its own.

Though many observers suppress the desire to dig into the layers of clothing to see if the entire installation is indeed built entirely of clothes, the actual amount of clothing used in the project represents only a tiny portion of the amount of goods that a Goodwill store processes daily.

When asked, Charzewski himself says that not knowing whether or not the piece is constructed exclusively with clothes is all part of the mystery. The fact that you don’t know how much clothing is produced and wasted makes the concept all the more potent.

“It makes you think, could those all be mine?” said sophomore Michelle Strick.

The artist hopes that the volume of Scarp is loud enough to probe C of C students to examine their own consumption habits beyond simply the accumulation of clothing.

“It’s about the impulse to purchase and replace things that don’t need to be replaced,” said Charzewski.

Beyond the profoundly accessible concept of the piece lies its sheer enormity and aesthetic. The mystery of construction and manipulation of material generated nearly entirely positive criticism from Sunday’s modest but enthusiastic audience.

“It’s very surprising. There is so much motion in it,” said CofC alumnus, Chris Pence. Accompanied by alumnus Linsey Moore, the self-proclaimed art enthusiasts marveled at Charzewski’s use of soothing lines and eye-pleasing colors.

Installations by Samater and Charzewski will be on exhibition at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art located within the Simons Center until October 10th. Charzewski will lecture on Scarp on Friday, Sept. 26 at 5 p.m. in Room 309 of Simons.

“This project is about fabricating history with our own synthetic and fleeting artifacts as the medium,” said Charzewski, a message that will surely strike a chord within the CofC community.