I hope to bring to my students that sense of discovery, possibility, of wonder, the contradictions of seeing and how interesting they can be. — Charles Hagen<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The works of Edvin Yegir, professor of communication design, and Charles Hagen, associate professor of photography, are featured in the 48th Annual Faculty Exhibition, which continues in the Benton\u2019s main gallery through Oct. 12. There are also a variety of media \u2013 including painting, sculpture, illustration, and printmaking and installation art \u2013 from their colleagues in the department, representing significant directions in contemporary art.<\/p>\n
Yegir and Hagen each have a distinctive view of the world through their art. Yegir has worked with corporations and cultural organizations helping them to communicate their ideas and products visually, and is director of the Design Center Studio, where students work on design projects for various University offices. Hagen has exhibited his images at museums, galleries and art schools in New York, Philadelphia, Connecticut, Canada, and Australia; taught and curated exhibitions throughout the United States; and served as an art critic for The New York Times<\/em> and a variety of arts publications.<\/p>\n Visual communication<\/strong><\/p>\n Yegir, who also works with national and international clients through his design consultancy: Typoptopia \/ Bureau for Visual Communication, says that while some define graphic design as visualizing ideas, \u201cultimately it\u2019s about visual communication, mediating ideas, brands, and messages in an intelligent and informed manner in any given medium.\u201d<\/p>\n A specialist in type design who collects and designs typefaces, Yegir says he continually works on a series of design experiments. For the past year he has focused on taking some of the most recognizable company slogans and re-contextualizing them on a background that is the ubiquitous symbol of the digital age \u2013 a multicolored bar code. Of the nearly 300 slogans he has typographically deconstructed, he selected 50 that run on a video projection in the exhibit.<\/p>\n \u201cThe main idea was to mostly use experimental typefaces that you would rarely see in the field associated with corporate branding,” he says. “Sometimes, even though the messages are self-contained, secondary messages form, depending on the sequence of words that precede and follow.\u201d<\/p>\n Among the familiar slogans: \u201cHave it your way\u201d from Burger King, \u201cWe deliver for you\u201d from the U.S. Postal Service, \u201cThink\u201d from IBM, \u201cJust do it\u201d from Nike, and \u201cJump in\u201d from Xbox.<\/p>\n \u201cI am a typographic designer. I believe that the design of visual communication is highly reliant on typography, regardless of the medium in which it appears and functions,\u201d Yegir says. \u201cIt is also the visualization of language itself. I have a tremendous interest in literature. Verbalization is the key to visualization.\u201d<\/p>\n Optical phenomena<\/strong><\/p>\n Hagen went to Rome during his sabbatical, where he was a visiting artist at the American Academy, and to India. He spent a month in each location traveling to various sites. Several of his images, which include one from an ongoing series of photos near his home in Brooklyn, N.Y., focus on reflections.<\/p>\n \u201cI find reflections fascinating,\u201d he says. \u201cOverall in my work I try to challenge what we think is reality. If you look at the world you imagine it\u2019s one way, but if you look more closely you start to notice the edges, the loose threads and things that don\u2019t quite fit. Reflections are a prime example of that and they\u2019re linked to photography; they are an optical phenomenon that looks like exactly what it is, but has these other edges and other sides.\u201d<\/p>\n The photographer says his process of discovering a subject he wants to capture as an image is not unlike the way something catches a person\u2019s eye as they are walking around a location.<\/p>\n Hagen\u2019s images in the exhibition include reflections of buildings on the hood of a parked car in Brooklyn, clothes drying on a bricked stairway along the Ganges River, the reflection of a boat along a river in Kerala, India, and the legs on a sculpture ruin in a park near Villa Doria Pamphilj in Rome.<\/p>\n \u201cOne thing I tell my students is that the picture you see at each stage of the process of making a photograph is different than what you saw a minute ago,\u201d Hagen says. \u201cYou\u2019re walking down the street and see something. It\u2019s different than when you put your camera up to your eye and start to frame it. There is a series of misidentifications, almost, as you go through from the initial urge to make the picture.\u201d<\/p>\n Hagen says he will bring the experiences of his sabbatical back to the classroom to his students: \u201cThis was a really interesting trip for me, looking at the world in different ways. I hope to bring to my students that sense of discovery, possibility, of wonder, the contradictions of seeing and how interesting they can be.\u201d<\/p>\n The Faculty Exhibition continues at the William Benton Museum of Art through Oct. 12, along with \u201cVictory is a Question of Stamina: Posters from the First World War.\u201d<\/a> For more information go to the Benton Museum website<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The annual Faculty Art Exhibition features new work created by Charles Hagen and Edvin Yegir while on sabbatical leave. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":96643,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[55],"class_list":["post-96634","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-02 01:41:26","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96634","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96634"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96634\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":96652,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96634\/revisions\/96652"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/96643"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96634"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=96634"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=96634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"A](\"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/Faculty-Art-do-no-evil-e1411134836449.jpg\")
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