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Pearls, papers inspire art

Pearls, papers inspire art.UA's Emily Davis Gallery challenges jewelers upstairs, offers newsas art downstairs. It's all on display until Oct. 4.By Dorothy Shinn.Beacon Journal art & architecture critic.Published on Monday, Jul 21, 2008.The Sermon on the Mount ends with the admonition ''neither cast yeyour pearl necklace pearls before swine'' — you should share things of valueonly with those who'll appreciate them.Through Oct. 4, the University of Akron Mary Schiller Myers Schoolof Art's Emily Davis Gallery has cast pearls before a constellationof jewelers, asking them to create works in response to thishistorically precious object, the results on view in the uppergallery.Meanwhile, in the lower gallery is Idiomsyncretic,by Oregon artist Pat Boas, who bases much of her work on the pagesof the New York Times.Boas examines the play between word-as-image and image-as word.Over the past decade, she has examined the coexistence of sense andnonsense in language through her series on the Times.In one series, Alphabet (NYT 10/01/01),she examines the Jan. 1, 2001, front page on 26 sheets of silktissue, each sheet printing the page with only one letter of thealphabet, as it's found on the page. Thus, we see the same pageliterally from A to Z.Those who've worked the Times doublecrostic know that the mostfrequent letter in the English language is E, and will not besurprised to find the sheet that reproduces all the Es gives us agood idea of how the page was laid out, while the page thatreproduces all the Zs hardly gives us a hint.Another series, All the Heads, shows us where the heads of people have appeared on the frontpages of the New York Times for 12 months.A third series, actually seemed to strive for something to ,you've cast your pearls in the wrong direction.