ANN ARBOR, MI - Gazing at the elaborate designs covering the windows of the University of Michigan Museum of Art and the Kelsey Museum of Archeology these days hints at the stories waiting to be told inside.
That's how artist and UM art and design professor Jim Cogswell envisioned his ambitious new mural, "Cosmogonic Tattoos," which tells the stories of ancient civilizations, while reflecting their respective environments.
Located across South State Street from each other, "Cosmogonic Tattooos" features reassembled fragments from a broad selection of artworks in the collections UMMA and the Kelsey Museum of Archeology, which are intended to be viewed as a single unfolding narrative.
Cogswell believes believes using the windows of the museums as a backdrop for his adhesive vinyl work establishes a relationship between what is on the glass and the exhibits inside the museums.
"I'm using objects from one museum and combining them with objects from another museum," Cogswell said. "That's a way of talking about the two different institutions but also the different origins between archeology and art. It also creates a story about dialogue transmission across time and space between these two institutions."
Those who have visited C.S. Mott Children's Hospital might be familiar with Cogswell's vinyl-on-glass work, which is displayed in his 2011 work "Enchanted Beanstalk," an adhesive vinyl mural applied to eight floors of windows, covering 11,000 square feet of glass across the west face of the hospital.
"Cosmogonic Tattoos," features similar ambition and scale, with Cogswell creating a procession of vivid images on the glass walls of the museums in a rhythmically evocative narrative, as well as a series of related drawings at UMMA. The exhibition is open through the end of 2017.
For "Cosmogonic Tattoos," Cogswell created around 250 different objects - many combined and fractured - that were drawn and later digitized in Adobe Illustrator. The digitized versions were converted into the adhesive vinyl-on-glass designs that are pieced together to tell a larger story -- about ourselves and how the world came to be.
The fractured nature of many of the objects, Cogswell said, opens up the imagination of viewers.
"It's a reflection of their history and a reflection of what happens to objects over time," Cogswell said. "Objects, just like us, deteriorate. It's a way of talking about space, mortality, geography and the transmission of objects. Fractured objects open themselves to the imaginations of viewers. That's something particularly appealing in an archeological museum, because you have this mystery behind what these things were and how they were used.
Using the windows as a backdrop, Cogswell said, opens passers-by to the "built environments" of buildings that often go unnoticed.
It's an exhibit that will hopefully catch the eye of those passing by, Cogswell said, creating a connection with art in a public space.
"The medium, in general, I really like, because opposed to making paintings that end up in a white cube - a gallery or museum space - this is out in a public space," Cogswell said. "People will see it whether they intended to go look for art or not. It's in the space where they work and congregate."
The UMMA is open 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and noon to 5 p.m. Sunday, while the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology is open from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and 1 to 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Both museums are free and open to the public.