Terrence Karpowicz: No Limits

There is something mildly transgressive about going to look at art in a library where people mill around chatting with glasses of wine, while not too far away, students are trying to study.

Nevertheless, that's what was happening at Terrence Karpowicz's opening, where he sat signing posters nea ra stack of books on labor relations. Sculptures spilled out of the Kemper Room Art Gallery throughout the upper level of the library. Karpowicz, who is especially fond of spheres, is known for his technique of joinery, and the strength of the pieces in this large show of sculptures lies largely in the way he integrates stone with wood or metal bases. Over the years, he has also joined organic materials, tree limbs, field stones and jagged shards of granite with geometric-shaped, machine-tooled metal bases. Karpowicz made monumental kinetic sculptures in earlier years but stopped a decade ago when he realized that placing those whirling bits of metal and wood in public presented a potential hazard. The focus of IIT's relatively new art exhibition program is the art of technology. Karpowicz's work is all about material and geometry, but it seems more at home in the outdoors. Even the smaller works seem like studies for larger public pieces of art. This is IIT's first exhibition space and it would do well to consider some kind of permanent gallery—elsewhere.—Ruth Lopez