Exhibit offers visual memory
Feb. 22 , 2008
The new exhibit at LaGrange College’s Lamar Dodd Art Center represents a tribute to the creative energy of Jamie Bishop, one of 32 faculty members and students killed by a lone gunman in April 2007 at Virginia Tech.
The opening reception for the show is slated for tomorrow from 6 to 8 p.m. and is open to the public. The exhibit will run through April 24.
The photographs and graphic designs on display reflect Bishop’s effort to “organize meaning from a sometimes chaotic jigsaw scatter of fascinating, if puzzling, pieces,” said his father, Michael Bishop, LaGrange College Writer-in-Residence.
Jamie struggled with eye difficulties from childhood, according to his dad. “Through it all Jamie persisted in seeing, not only the physical world before him but also the aesthetic projections—products of an internal vision—with which he would work to transfigure that world.”
Though he was teaching German at the time of his death, Jamie had planned to earn an MFA and to pursue graphic design as a career.
According to his wife, Steffi Hofer, Jamie was fascinated by unusual patterns and surfaces.
“Often, people stopped to look at what Jamie was photographing,” she said. “I could tell that they were completed puzzled: Why was this young man taking a picture of a rusty chain in a run-down courtyard in Charleston, South Carolina, when far more picturesque views lay right in front of his eyes?
“They had no idea what Jamie planned to do with his images.”
Now, the public can see those images and also how Jamie incorporated them into unique collages. Lamar Dodd Art Center is open from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Monday through Friday.
For more information on the exhibit, call (706) 880-8211.
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