As an artist, Fannie Jou doesn’t like to know how her work will end up when she starts it.
“I like working with dynamic forms,” Jou said. “I don’t start with a concrete idea — everything’s kind of a progression.”
“Technology Man,” one of Jou’s latest works, began the same way.
“I started out just drawing a computer,” Jou said. The work quickly took on a life of its own, as the computer became the head of a figure with a smaller child-like figure beside it, also with the head of a computer, and computer images surrounding them. The man’s torso ends at the bottom frame of the picture, but beneath the frame are stuffed trousers — not drawn but instead real — tacked to the wall, that run into brown shoes on the floor. The trousers are surrounded by a tangle of computer cables that descend to the floor from behind the framed image.
The piece is about modern man’s fixation with technology, said Jou.
“No one can go around without a cell phone anymore,” Jou said. People are always checking e-mail, making phone calls and constantly attached to modern computing devices. “We’re always plugged in,” said Jou.
Jou was one of 18 Richard Montgomery High School seniors whose works were on display Sunday, March 25 in the 14th and final Garage Show Art Gallery. The show displays the work of the school’s International Baccalaureate (IB) program art students. The students attend Richard Montgomery from all over Montgomery County, including Potomac, and have spent their final two years of high school in an intensive art program for which the Garage Show is the culminating exhibition.
The show began fourteen years ago in a garage behind the school, said Ruth Fishman, the director of the IB art program. Eventually the garage was renovated into an art studio, but that was later taken over as a portable classroom in 2000. Since then parents have donated money to the art program each year to transform an auxiliary gym in the back of the school into an art gallery, said Fishman.
WHEN RICHARD MONTGOMERY moves into its new facility next year, the art program will receive its own exhibition area, thus ending the tradition of the Garage Show theme, said Fishman. Consequently the art students chose the theme of “Old School” for the exhibition to honor the bowing out of the annual exhibition and the school itself.
The show will be on display through the week for the all of the school’s students to view, said Fishman. Next week the IB art students will have oral examinations based on their displays to explain and defend their works.
“The new mandate in schooling these days is assessment,” said Fishman. Students in the IB art program see each of their works through from start to finish, conceptualizing, designing and executing each piece, said Fishman. “For me, this is the best assessment you can have.”
Jou and Elizabeth Chen, both seniors from Potomac, collaborated on a work called “Duck, Duck, Goose” that was on display Sunday night. The work is a framed bed sheet with a mallard duck pattern onto which several brightly colored geese are sewn.
“We saw this [sheet] just laying around in the studio and thought ‘this will work,’” said Jou.
Another of Chen’s works on display was “Perfection.” Inside a tarnished frame is the letter ‘A,’ carved from wood and suspended by a tangle of strings and wires. The backdrop inside of the frame is yellowed shreds of old homework assignments, tests, and report cards.
“It’s about all of the tension and everything [people] go through to achieve perfection in school and in life,” said Chen. Chen said the piece is intended to make the viewer question what it means to be perfect and whether perfection is something that is really worth trying to achieve. Chen collaborated on the work with fellow art student Allison Caplan.
“We wanted to dedicate the show to this year,” said senior Mark Hsan, one of four student curators of the show. “Since it’s the last year we wanted to make it the best possible show,” Hsan said.
The curators thanked all of their parents and art teachers, and Fishman in particular. Senior Fiona Matthews, who displayed at the show and who was also one of the curators, said that Fishman’s help and support throughout the program was invaluable.
“She let us live in her classroom the last three years,” said Matthews. “Mrs. Fishman has basically been my second mother.”