A group of art students addressed the elephant in the room—a white one, with black butterflies, at that.
The elephant was part of a collaborative project of George Mason University students displayed at the third annual Off The Wall scholarship event held on Saturday, April 16.
The benefit highlights the works of students in George Mason’s Film and Video Studies (FAVS), Computer Game Design and the School of Art.
Mason instructor Tamryn McDermott’s Sculpture I class spent about three weeks hard at work on the large elephant, which has been dubbed “Elephamboo.” The class created a social media hashtag by the same name for the project.
The name is a nod to the materials it’s made from—cardboard, papier mâché and bamboo harvested by students from Mason property along Roberts Road. Paper butterflies were suspended in the elephant’s stomach after the students moved the finished project into place Thursday afternoon, hanging it from a ceiling in the Art and Design Building.
It also features feet that doubled as seats for visitors looking up and into the hanging elephant.
The project is a nod to phrases “the elephant in the room” and “butterflies in your stomach,” said senior Ashley Topolosky, an art and visual technology major enrolled in the class.
“Everything is a play on words, and we made it into a conceptual art piece,” Topolosky said.
One of the requirements of the project was to create something that would fill up an entire space, said sophomore Yasmine Elaine Patterson, a community health major in the class.
It was fulfilling to see it finally in place, Patterson said.
In two years, Off the Wall has raised about $30,000 in scholarship money for students.
Ryan Hill, a senior FAVS major, received some of the money raised by the event.
“It’s a validation of what I’m doing; the [FAVS] staff believe in me as a filmmaker,” Hill said of the scholarship.
He received the junior transfer award, which provides students with $1,200 in scholarship money each semester.