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This month inside the Victoria H. Myhren gallery media artist Cliff Evans combines the rhythmic cutting of images and the layering of sound and motion to entice audience members to examine the concept of containment.

Three screens comprise the exhibit. One large screen in the all white room flashes “Citizen: The Wolf and Nanny”, while two smaller screens on the side project “Camping at Home; Untitled” and “Untitled”. The photo montage animation is comprised with cut out images found on Flickr or Google layered with movement and sound in order to produce a piece that can play with the emotions traditionally assigned to images.

“That is what is so great about what I get to work with. The images are already there, someone already took them,” Evans said.

Evans was born in Darkwood, New South Wales, Australia and studied film and video studio art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He became interested in multimedia works after a friend introduced him to the motion and visual effects program Adobe After Effects. Utilizing images already shot freed him from the cost of production and inspired him to play with images connotations. He now resides and works in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Reorganization and assigning of new meaning was utilized in “The Wolf and the Nanny” to juxtapose the natural world and the containment of the developed world. Images first begin on a grassy hill where a naked family can be viewed from behind. As the image pans out the audience is given a rounder viewpoint of the hill’s landscape sprinkled with lounging families snapping photographs and Bounder Camping RV’s and tents.

“From there we escape from the wilderness into the city state, delivered by a nanny pushing a stroller while jogging. As a result of this deliverance we find police presence, an in between of construction and suburban life,” Evans said.

“For there to be a wilderness, containment must exist,” Evans said.

In the bottom section of the screen, a dead cow is seen with a naked woman seemingly exalting it’s hanging carcass. Evans hoped to raise questions on why humans exalt the idea of the untouched natural world.

“The pagan is seen as pure, but we have no real idea what that means anymore. Purity in nature becomes an idea that guides our reactions to it though we are often too removed to feel the sublime,”

Evans said.

The artist believes that images have begun to instill the same feelings of the actual objects in the photo.

“People can look at a photograph and feel the same emotion as if they were viewing it in real life,” said Evans.

Evans offers an insightful view of the walls created to divide humanity from the world they were born into in his compilations of images. The exhibit is open to students and the public at Myhren Art Gallery  in Shwayder Art Building until Feb. 21.

Additionally the gallery is continuing an exhibit of Colorado modernist painter and former DU faculty member John Edwards. The exhibit features a collection of Edwards’ paintings, sketches and murals. The exhibit of Edwards’ work will be on display until Jan. 17 and hopes to raise support for the restoration of his 350 square foot Shakespeare-themed mural in the Little Theater of the Margery Reed building.