This story was published in The Weekly, a supplement to The Daily Northwestern

Walking into the open space of the Chicago Art Department, one might overlook a simple yet challenging piece that rests just above their heads–”Sovereign Image.” With a series of oddly shaped blocks formed by colored tape, the inconspicuous image sparks in the viewer a new sense of evaluation.

“I’m just trying to figure out how a viewer would relate to a work of art that’s first of all on the ceiling representing something that’s typically under your feet, [with] a bodily relationship to an image and then to reality,” says Weinberg senior Allison Putnam, the artist who created “Sovereign Image.”

Putnam is one of less than 10 art students graduating this year. Her interest in pursuing art grew as the end of high school neared, and she came to Northwestern as a double major in art and biology. When a visiting professor lectured on social control with physical spaces, she became intrigued by the architectural aspect of art. While NU’s art department is small, it hardly limits its students. “[They] let us experiment and try radically different ways of working,” Putnam says.

Putnam researches how architecture can manipulate people’s behavior within a space. She notes how people carry themselves differently when walking in Evanston–a safe, affluent town, compared to Chicago, which was originally based upon Paris in design to limit civil unrest. Through discovering ways of applying formal relationships of architectural plans, drawings and maps to how people live in real space and in real life, she’s able to capture “where formal plans and formal relationships intersect with social dynamics.”While researching, she read homeless people are not given a space in a city, so they end up in public spaces. Most public spaces are so heavily controlled, however, that it’s no longer public and thus function as private places. “The challenge is to find those moments where no one is controlling a space” Putnam says.

Consider the challenge Putnam faces this Friday when she, along with other junior and senior art students, host an art show located in an empty store in downtown Evanston.”[The show] is really about trying to connect to the Evanston community and make art for an audience that isn’t necessarily interested in going to a museum or a gallery district or a space set aside for art specifically,” Putnam says. “I think it’s more interesting when art is something you are confronted with in everyday life, on the way to the grocery store.”