Carole Loeffler, Assistant Professor Fine Arts and Coordinator of Foundations, is featured in a four-person Fall 2010 Exhibition called The Sitting Room: 4 Studies in the Second Floor Galleries at the Philadelphia Art Alliance through Jan. 3.

The Sitting Room: Four Studies incorporates “newly commissioned works with a post-disciplinary approach to the expanding definition of the term ‘craft’ to create four separate but interrelated installations based on the historical concept of the sitting room,” according to the PAA.

“Carole Loeffler’s work is a form of visual archaeology rather than a specific aesthetic style. She creates elaborate cultural object based narratives through furnishings and décor. Her installations use objects to signify displacement, as she considers the objects as metonyms or stand-ins for the person who’s not visible. Rather than symbolic, the objects are specific in terms of an individual’s use in an exact position, adjacency, and context of the room.

“For the exhibition Loeffler will present an installation entitled, 5 Situations: to conflict and coalesce. This will include five small circular rooms within the gallery space. The walls will be made out of fabric that is Victorian inspired hung on a circular frame with individual flooring. In each room there will be a set of upholstered chairs. Each set of chairs will create a feeling that occurs in a formal reception space. The placement of the chairs is meant to dictate the different feelings and emotions a living room creates and to reinforce various feelings, such as separation, isolation, tension and awkwardness.

For example, in one room, two chairs will be upholstered together back to back. The vertical backs of the chairs will be one unit. Another room will have two chairs upholstered together to sit side by side, and yet two others will be created as circles facing inward and outward. In addition, each room will also include a multi-layered sound piece that involves verbs that begin with the letter c. The subtle sound element is meant to reinforce the range of feelings in each room or “situation.” Read more at www.philartalliance.org/exhibits.htm.