An Interview with Gregory Steel

By John Stanifer

 

Gregory Steel, M.F.A.

Lecturer in Fine Arts

Office: Main Building, Room 227

Phone: (765) 455-9585

e-mail: gsteel@iuk.edu

“Fine arts,” says Gregory Steel, “tends to be a highly misunderstood term.”  Certainly, as I sat down with Professor Steel on the very warm Monday of March 26, I felt my own preconceptions about our Fine Arts program being challenged.  Though it would be easy for an outsider to think of sculptures, paintings, and other traditional forms of “visual art” as the primary focus of a Fine Arts program, this is not necessarily the case.

“The Fine Arts program is about broadening your ability to think creatively.  You bring this creativity to whatever else you do,” Steel said.  In other words, it’s not just for artists.  A good friend of Professor Steel’s, now a successful doctor, brought this creativity with her to medical school.  “She was successful in medical school because of this creativity,” he said.

What sorts of experiences can students expect who decide to go with the Fine Arts concentration?  With his video work and sculptures having been selected for more than 30 exhibitions in the United States and Europe, Steel is known for his own creativity as an artist and as a lecturer in fine arts.  Says Steel: “How the [artistic] experience is packaged is small potatoes.”

Imagine walking into a dark room with a giant video screen projected on the wall.  Most of us are used to this sort of experience, whether it’s in the lecture hall or at the cinema.  But in this case, instead of the normal movie we expect, we see the image of a man struggling with a large rope, and on another screen, we see blood cells as big as hub caps coursing through veins and arteries. Near by are computers with graphics of pulse rate, CO2 levels and other physiological signs coming in from the Internet. An empty chair bids us to have a seat and become part of the scene.  Steel put together an experience like this for one of his exhibitions.

“All of these things are related to experience; they become methods by which we see another reality,” Steel said.  The video installations and other highly creative experiences stop the person’s normal reality and bring them into another.  Things that we don’t think about every day may become more real to us through fine arts, and the projects students work on will bring new thoughts and ideas that they hadn’t considered.

“The world beats it [creativity] out of you,” Steel said.  Children have wonder, he says, and almost all great people have this childlike spirit about them.  It’s not about being childish, he insists—but childlike.

With a Fine Arts concentration, students can recapture that sense of wonder and creativity and develop it in ways they never expected.