Opening doors

The Olin Art Gallery opens its season with Professor of Art Barry Gunderson's "A Door of One's Own: Sculptural Explorations of Terrace Housing and the Stories Within," an exhibit that grew out of the sculptor's 2005-06 sabbatical year as a visiting fellow at the School of Art at John Moores University in Liverpool, England.

Gunderson will present an artist's talk in Olin Auditorium on Thursday, September 7, at 7:30 p.m., with a reception to follow in Olin Art Gallery.

"During my year in Liverpool, terrace houses were a fascination for me," Gunderson has written. "I quickly became interested in those long strings of houses where owners assert their individuality with distinct divisions of color, pattern, and building material, even when the structural integrity is disrupted. From these external observations, I couldn't help thinking about ownership, possession, and territory-theirs/ours, yours/mine, his/hers-and thus, what stories, dialogues, confrontations, and dramas might take place within these structures."

The fourteen works on display are stylized, patterned houses, fabricated in wood and mixed media and mounted on the wall. Designed to scale, they suggest architectural models-schematics of the pace and style of urban domestic life, an imagined social fabric.

"This exhibition is about rethinking the commonplace," Gunderson writes. "It's about the fantasy of dialogue behind the adjoining doors."

The exhibit, which opened August 24, will run through September 23. Olin Art Gallery is open Monday through Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 8:00 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.