The Michigan Daily I michigandaily com I Thursday, April 7, 2011

weekend
essentials
Apr. 7 to 10
)
ON STAGE
Double your fun this
weekend with per-
formances by two of
the greatest string
quartets. Tomorrow,
the Takscs Quartet
will team up with pia-
nist Jeffrey Kahane at
Rackham Auditorium.
Saturday, acclaimed
violinist Christian Tet-
zlaff, his sister Tanja
and two other mem-
bers of the Tetzlaff
Quartet will take the
stage. Tickets from $24
and $20, respectively.

At a university with
more than 26,000
students and hun-
dreds of disciplines,
an innovative thesis idea can be a
hard thing to come by. Yet, every
year students in varied depart-
ments and colleges stumble upon
original creations for their senior
honors theses. The subjects range
anywhere from dramatic plays to
short films to ... human hair.
The main installation piece
for Art & Design senior Autumn
Fawn Hernandez's thesis, called
"Aquhairium," will be a set of
glass cylinders, each of which are
two feet tall and four inches in
diameter.
Hernandez plans to suspend
the cylinders from the ceiling in
a dark space, filling them with
water and different kinds of hair.
The cylinders will be lit up and an
air pump will blow bubbles into
them.
"Depending on the kind of hair
that's in it - if it's really coarse or
fine or oily or dyed - air collects
to the hair differently and will
get trapped in it or escape," she
explained. "When they're lit up,
it puts focus on the hair and you
can just see all these little bubbles
caught in it."
The inspiration for "Aquhair-
ium" came last year while Her-
nandez was studying abroad in
Australia. The assignment for her
three jewelry design classes there
was to create pieces out of a medi-
um other than metal.
"A 'weird' medium is what they
called it," Hernandez said. "So I
picked wax. When I was work-
ing with wax, that obviously led
to hair."
She quickly began work on
a line of pendants out of wax-
removed hair.
"The idea behind that was
to take a piece of someone with
you," she said. "I made all these
really great friends I was going
to leave in six months and never
see again, so I took hot wax and
I would wax one of my friends'

belly buttons or something with
actual wax. If you let it set long
enough and rip it off, then the
hair is just perfectly in the wax."
Hernandez then set the hair-
wax in metal to complete the pen-
dents.
Another one of Hernandez's
pieces involved cutting up the
legs of pantyhose until she had
15 feet of fabric. She stuffed the
fabric with hair from local salons
and used it as a runway piece,
draped around her body. As she
walked down the runway, hair
trickled out of the open ends of
the hosiery.
At the same time as her Austra-
lian experiments, she was receiv-
ing e-mails from her professors
about picking a topic for her
senior thesis.
"And I was all geeked up and
excited about hair," she said. "I
wanted to just continue what I
was doing."
"Aquhairium" opens April 15 at
6 p.m. in the basement of Work:
Ann Arbor on State St. In addition
to this exhibition, Hernandez has
been photographing her installa-
tion for the Douglas J Aveda salon
on Liberty St. She will be insert-
ing large-scale photographs into
the glass tables where customers
sit while they wait to get their
hair done.
Hernandez's continued dedi-
cation to the medium of hair
stems partially from the reac-
tions she got from her classmates
in Australia.
"My class was just so appalled,"
she said. "I was just this one for-
eign, American chick that was
messing around with hair, and
they were just so grossed out.
When I showed my class my
pieces, they just cringed and
didn't even want to be by it. That
response was so exciting to me."
Hernandez hopes her ongo-
ing interest in a rather eccentric
subject will come across in the
exhibition and inspire others to
rethink hair.
"Hair, water, air and light -

those four elements come togeth-
er when you're showering, when
you're swimming," she said. "And
you don't really appreciate what's
happening."
Hernandez doesn't want peo-
ple to have a specific reaction to
"Aquhairium."
"I want people to think whatev-
er they're going to think because
it's art," she said. "But I want peo-
ple to kind of just stop and appre-
ciate the beauty because there's a .
repulsion-attraction to the hair.
"It's disembodied hair," she
added. "People usually think hair
off the body is gross, you know -
you have a random hair in your
food, you don't like it. So I'm just
going to put a bunch of hair and
hang it and hope that people can
appreciate it and think about hair
differently."
In all dimensions
Screen Arts and Cultures
senior Jacob Mendel's honors the-
sis is a 20-minute short film called
"Train of Shadows," a "surrealist
film noir" that tells the story of a
man who wakes up on atrain with
amnesia and meets a hypnotist
who guides him through various
memories. The film begins with a
shot paying homage to the Lumi-
ere Brothers' 1895 silent film "The
Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Sta-
tion" - a scene that evokes what
Mendel calls the "mechanization
of time" - and then proceeds
through a nonlinear narrative,
with the audience piecing togeth-
er the story the same time the
protagonist is.
"It's all period, it's all 1920s,"
he said. "It involves many dif-
ferent locations, many different
spaces. I'm editing it now and ...
you kind of get sucked into the
diegesis."
Mendel is no stranger to inven-
tive works in the field of film. He
studied abroad in Prague during
his junior year and directed a film
called "Zlata Rybka," which is
See THESES, Page 3B

FILM
When your resume
includes "Fargo" and
"Miller's Crossing,"
you get to direct a
rote remake of an old
Western and still get
nominated for a bajillion
Oscars. Well, that's not
entirely fair. "True Grit"
featured gorgeous cin-
ematography and excel-
lent performances by
Jeff Bridges and Hailee
Steinfeld. It's screening
for free at 7 p.m. tomor-
row at the Natural
Science Auditorium.
CONCERT
Swedish trio Movits!
is bringing its unique
combination of hip hop
and swing to the Blind
Pig tonight. Consist-
ing of brothers Johan
and Anders Rensfeldt
(who contribute vocals
and DJing, respec-
tively) and saxophon-
ist Joakim Nilsson,
the band may provide
your only chance to
dance the jitterbug
and get jiggy with it at
the same show. Doors
open at 9 p.m., and
tickets start at $12.
AT THE MIC

It's a hope and an
0 inspiration to be
unique and creative
and be who you are.
It sounds really
cheesy, but it's
beautiful.
Yonit Olshan
Interarts senior

Can't get enough of
the School of Music,
Theatre & Dance? The
Symphony Band will be
performing tomorrow
at 8 p.m. at Hill Audito-
rium. Under conductor
Michael Haithcock, the
band will present a rep-
ertoire of pieces fusing
Chinese, European and
American musical tra-
ditions. University alum
Xiang Gao will perform
as a soloist, premiering
COB MENDEL Prof. Kristen Kuster's
YAN ISAKOW "Two Jades." Free.

BY SALAMR IL)A AN[