To make good art, you have to make a little toxic waste.

Occasionally the stuff has to be contained and labeled for proper disposal. Studio art professor Laura Pharis was doing just that recently, when she paused to chat about the upcoming Sweet Briar College Art Faculty Show. The exhibit will run from Jan. 26 through April 8 in the Anne Gary Pannell Gallery. It is free and open to the public.

Porcelain wall pockets by Joe Monk.A reception with the exhibitors, SBC faculty members Joe Monk, Paige Critcher, John Morgan and Pharis, will be held 5:15 to 6:30 p.m. Jan. 26.

Faculty shows are held every four years so that students can see their teachers’ works exhibited at least once while they’re at Sweet Briar without having to travel to an out-of-town gallery, Pharis said. “It’s important to put ourselves on the line in the same way that we ask them to.”

“China Cat,” colored pencil drawing, by Laura Pharis.On the other hand, by not showing too often, the department avoids a “Sweet Briar look.” “I really like the fact that the students’ work is very disparate and they don’t replicate what we do,” Pharis said.

Nonetheless, there are “conversations” among the faculty’s works that may appear in a shared color or a compositional form in one piece that echoes another, she said. For example, Morgan uses a particular blue in one of his signature assemblages of found objects. It’s close to the cobalt in Pharis’ drawing of a cat.

“That drawing of mine is going to have an eye-rhyme with the blue in John’s work,” Pharis said.

“Navigator” by John Morgan, from the series “Seeking Infinite Wisdom,” collage, assemblage and encaustic.The drawing started as shards of broken blue and white china arranged into the shape of a leaping cat. She “compulsively” drew each individual fragment, faithfully re-creating the patterns.

Animals and other organic things also are the subject of Paige Critcher’s photographs, yet they are found objects, too.

Monk, a ceramics and sculpture professor who says found materials are the common thread in his own work, had watched Critcher scan a dead songbird for a piece she was working on. He offered her some desiccated rats he’d saved as SBC’s old dairy barns were being converted to new space for the studio arts program.

“They don’t look dead,” Monk said. “They look otherworldly.”

“Ormazd” by Paige Critcher, from the series “Specimen.” Epson ink print on canvas.Pharis called Critcher’s photographic renderings of the departed dairy denizens “imposing.”

In addition to a selection of porcelain “wall pockets,” Monk will exhibit several “memory” vases, his contemporary take on memory jugs from the folk art tradition. The vessels are encrusted “like barnacles” with objects both found and fabricated, he said. He duplicates some pieces by making molds from the originals – the better to cover the surfaces of the vases, which can measure as much as 2 feet in diameter.

Morgan also morphs ordinary items into art, creating shadowbox assemblages from encaustic drawings and paper collages arranged with sundry odds and ends he’s acquired. “He has this incredible sense of composition,” Pharis said of his multi-dimensional collages. “He’s painting, only with real objects.”

“All of us are taking cues from the beautiful country at Sweet Briar. And we are all interested in the process,” Pharis said. “The idea that you’re making stuff with your hands changes the [original] subject. For example, drawing the china shards arranged as a cat translates it into something else.”

Before resuming her housekeeping, Pharis said she’d enjoyed talking about the art show. “It was a nice break from toxic waste clean up.”

For more information, please e-mail rmlane@sbc.edu or call 381-6248.

– By Jennifer McManamay, SBC staff writer