The Kohlmeyer Circle Presents: Jenny Hager's Flight Lab

The Kohlmeyer Circle, the young support group for the Ogden Museum, has been dedicated, for several years now, to bringing emerging artists whose projects include a technological component to the Ogden on White Linen Night. This years offering is Jenny Hager's Flight Lab.

Jenny K. Hager is an Assistant Professor of Sculpture at the University of North Florida, where she has been teaching for four years. She received her MFA in Sculpture and Digital Media from San Jose State University in San Jose, CA. She also holds a BA in Art Education and a BFA in Art Studio from the University of Kentucky in Lexington, KY.

Interested in a variety of processes and materials, including steel, cast iron, post-it notes, video, wood, digital photography and found objects, she finds inspiration in dreams, objects from her childhood, gadgets, sea life and other curiosities. She is also very interested in collaboration; the spirit of community important in both her teaching practice and in her own work.

Hager’s work has been exhibited across the country and currently at Ironstone, the Kidwelly Castle Exhibition in Wales. She and her husband, Lance Vickery (also a sculptor), recently collaborated on a large outdoor sculpture for the city of Ft. Pierce, FL. Another recent project involved collaborating with 106 sculptors across the country to create a large body of sculptural work called Imagillaboration, currently a traveling exhibition.

Flight Lab is currently housed in a fourth-floor gallery of the Ogden Museum's Goldring Hall. The openning of the exhibition on White Linen night marked another successful event sponsored and supported by the Kohlmeyer Circle.

Flight Lab

The inventor who works in this laboratory is a pseudo-scientist who is interested in achieving flight through the mechanics of swimming. Through the exploration of ideas, sketches, and models, the inventor studies possible methods of achieving flight by these means. Flight Lab
references the dream and the tool used to achieve flight, the flight suit. Upon entering the dark gallery, the viewer sees a video projection of someone wearing a white form-fitting suit and white aviator goggles, flying through empty space. The suit has webbed feet and webbed hands. The image of the person flying travels through space on the gallery walls, from one wall to the next. Each wall resembles an observation window in an aquarium, the projection is a continuous loop in which the viewer is surrounded. In the center of the gallery floor is a display case which houses the flight suit, a remnant from another time or place and the tangible object that remains from the dream.