The Review

Issue date: 11/13/07 Section: Mosaic

Media Credit: David Meyer

Media Credit: Esteban Pilonieta

Georgia O'Keeffe once said, "Art is not what you see, but what you make others see." Art, then, encourages a healthy ambiguity and interaction with the viewer - a concept which is not always translated through cordoned-off sculptures and glass-encased paintings in museums.

For David Meyer, a sculptor and assistant professor of art at the university, O'Keeffe's statement is a mantra.

"When I'm making something I'm always thinking of how the viewer would interpret the piece," Meyer says while clicking through photos of his art on his Web site. "My art would mean nothing if no one saw it."

Meyer has made a career out of making people think. His numerous sculptures can be found on Main Street and throughout the university, as well as nationally. Currently, he has an exhibition at the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, titled "Separate by Sight #3."

Sitting at his desk, flanked by an old card catalog to his left and a window to a student art studio to his right, Meyer nimbly moves through the computerized photos of his work, reminiscing about his artistic career to date. Clad in sneakers, jeans, a hunter-green T-shirt and a baseball cap just a hue darker than his shirt, Meyer may not look like the average professor, but embodies an active sculptor, ready to pick up a chisel at any moment.

Meyer says "Separation by Sight" is an ongoing idea, and relates to how people make sense of the world. The installation is composed of small piles of flour on the floor, gathered to form shapes throughout the room. The flour-pile forms are scattered throughout the space, which encourages viewers to walk around them, therefore interacting with the art.

"What I really hope for is that when a person goes in there, they have a recognition and then doubt," Meyer says of the forms' interpretation.

He says the concept of the installation is like cloud-watching.

"The forms all keep changing according to the person," Meyer says. "When little kids get in there, they know exactly what they are seeing. Adults have more experience and history, and take longer to interpret the forms."

While this installation is confined to a museum setting, Meyer says he prefers watching viewers' reactions to his outdoor pieces.

"Outdoors, people either love it or hate it," he says. "I don't know about other countries, but in America that is our space, we own that, so anything you put out there, people are very candid about what they like and don't like. It's refreshing as an artist not to have people dancing around saying, 'Oh, I like it,' but not saying anything else."

This strong public reaction is demonstrated through Meyer's Main Street piece, titled "Recognizable Something," a sculpture composed of 3/8-inch stainless steel rods formed into hundreds of connecting lines. He says the piece is based on experience and open for limitless interpretation.

"For me, I was looking for an organic line, like flying across country looking down at river patterns, or that shape you find when you peel back bark and bugs have been crawling around behind it," Meyer says. "I was hoping that people would look at it and say, 'Oh, it reminds me of this.' "

However, it seems people delight in a physical interaction with "Recognizable Something" more so than a mental interaction. Due to the orb's ability to spin, the sculpture has become a Main Street fixture that passersby often "experience."

"I almost anticipated people spinning it," Meyer says. "What I didn't anticipate was a father placing his kids on it and spinning."

Nedre Doravio, who works at the sculpture's neighboring Crystal Concepts, says she often sees students stopping to play with it.

"One night near Homecoming, a bunch of boys blew up balloons inside of it and completely filled it with balloons," Doravio says.

"Recognizable Something" was originally commissioned by the Downtown Newark Partnership to bring aesthetic appeal to Main Street. Maureen Feeney Roser, administrator of the Downtown Newark Partnership and assistant planning director for the city, says public arts are an effective way to promote art and culture in Newark.

"Public art adds a visual appeal and interest to a visitor's trip," Feeney Roser says. "It makes your trip more enjoyable and memorable."

Another often overlooked art project Meyer was involved with is the solar system plaques scattered throughout campus, inspired by the Mineralogical Museum's 1999 exhibition "One Small Step: Exploring America's Adventures in Space,1959-1999."

In combination with astronomy professor Harry Shipman and museum director Belena Chapp, Meyer created plaques out of cold springs black granite, to be distributed throughout the campus in the form of a solar system. The planets are all properly distanced from each other and their scaled-down size is carved into the plaque - for instance, Pluto is the size of a poppy seed.

"We started with the sun at Old College, since that's the oldest building," Meyer explains. "Neptune is at Worrilow Hall. Uranus was near Gilbert but got stolen. Pluto is the farthest, although now he's been kicked out of the solar system. It's still there though, all the way down at the Rust Ice Arena."

Shipman says Meyer was a key member of the collaborative because he had some concrete ideas of how to create physical objects for the solar system model that would make it artistic and attractive.

"If I had done the project myself, we would probably have ended up with dots on bricks and a few words of text somewhere," Shipman says. 

A more somber installation Meyer has created is his memorial for the 1996 Oklahoma City bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. The memorial is located on the corner across the street from where the building once stood and was commissioned by the regional Archdiocese for St. Joseph's Catholic Church.

"You have to ask yourself how you can measure 168 people visually," Meyer says of the number of people killed in the bombing. "I went to the site and there is this beautiful chain-link fence that people were placing really poetic things on. I really loved that connection, that people were making a pilgrimage to this site to do something, to somehow take control of something uncontrollable."

Meyer created a wall with voids in it to replicate the feeling of the chain-linked fence where people could place sentimental things. The rest of the area is left open to encourage people to walk through, except for scattered pillars ranging from "kid sized" to six feet.

"As you stand among the pillars you feel a relationship to the body," he says. "Because you know, there were kids killed and there were adults killed. The pillars make you ask yourself if they are the people killed, or were they the ones that were left behind, the ones who really suffered."

Meyer says originally he wasn't interested in doing the project because he was in Delaware at the time, but after seeing the mediocre and boring proposals of what could go there, he decided to spearhead the project. He also felt a strong connection to the area because he grew up in Oklahoma City, and was baptized in the church directly behind the memorial he created.

Despite his initial hesitance, Meyer is more than pleased with the results of his installation.

"As much political stuff you have to go through to do all this stuff, when you're standing there amongst people who are crying and you know, moved that way, you just feel like wow, OK it was worth it, this is great - it's beyond my comprehension," he says.

The installation also incorporated a weeping Christ figure. To create this figure, Meyer says he took a friend, who has a goatee, to the university theater department and dressed him up to be a Christ-figure to model for the piece.

"In their foyer we took shot after shot, until he started tiring, and so finally he fell into this pose which was perfect," Meyer says. "The whole thing is like this figure of Christ that lost faith in humanity because we are so brutal to ourselves."

Before coming to Delaware, Meyer attended the Kansas City Art Institute. After originally thinking he wanted to be a painter, it was in college he discovered sculpture, a "whole new medium where I realized I could do everything and anything."

Ten years after graduating from KCAI, he applied to the university and got a graduate teaching position in the art department. Upon completing this degree, he taught at neighboring colleges such as Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Meyer returned to the university as head exhibition designer at the university gallery, and eventually became a professor in the art department.

Currently, he teaches beginning, intermediate and advanced sculpture classes, as well as graduate courses.

Meyer's artistic career has been a whirlwind, and he has created innumerable installations, sculptures and exhibitions. Despite his plethora of options, he says he cannot pinpoint a favorite.

"They are all so different because I am different every time I make them," Meyer says. "Almost all of them teach me something, like you have an epiphany looking at them, which I love. They're all my favorite."

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