Nofziger's work is the fourth exhibition at the Sarah Doyle Gallery, located on the first floor of the Sarah Doyle Women's Center. The purpose of the gallery is to provide a space for professional artists, said Liz Bird '07, student coordinator of the Sarah Doyle Gallery. Though located in the Sarah Doyle Women's Center, the gallery is not limited to works dealing only with women's issues.
"A lot of times we have women's artists, and some have to do with women's issues, but artists are selected for the images themselves," Bird said.
Although gender roles had some relevance in Nofziger's installation, her work took inspiration from the physical space of the room itself. A bare light bulb blinks on the table-top fountain made of fake wood that Nofziger found in a garbage can in Philadelphia. The fountain stands across from an old, brick fireplace coated with the soot of past fires.
"The fireplace is now defunct. There is a space of scrubbed brick that has not been charred in the center," Nofziger said. A 14-minute looped film of volcano lava crashing into the ocean, taken during a trip to Hawaii's Volcanoes National Park, is projected onto the fireplace. "I re-ignited the fire," she said.
"I wanted to oppose the rekindled fire with a beacon of the inauthentic. A blinking light is a sign bulb masquerading as nature," Nofziger said. "This is a dried-up, fake fabrication of what it stands across from."
The legacy of Sarah Doyle also influenced the work. "I thought about Sarah Doyle and her direct community influence through education. She was influential in clubs, the coming together of creative, like-minded people who ... challenge one another," Nofziger said.
Indeed, the theme of clubs - their potential to facilitate interactions as well as to exclude others - influenced Nofziger's work in the adjoining room. Blown-up looseleaf torn from elementary-school notebooks and typed pages with typos are relics of the artist's childhood clubs created with friends. One page outlines the rules of the club, and another details a short story. The third work mimics legal contracts, but with a child's cursive writing and misspelled words describing the "certification" of two friends becoming "Adopted Sisters."
Nofziger's installation explores the dual nature and purpose of social clubs while promoting the center. Although the Sarah Doyle Women's Center is not a club, its monthly exhibits provide an alternative space that attracts a diverse group of art-lovers, Bird said.
"It's a great way to get people who aren't gender-minded to come in," Bird said.
