Behind the art: Urban sprawl

On the back wall of the School of Fine Arts Gallery hangs LaRinda Meinburg’s “Urban Growth,” a piece for one of this fall’s shows, “HUB: A Collaboration of Art and Space.”

On Oct. 3, the show’s pieces will be moved into trucks and transported to the McCalla School parking lot on the corner of 10th Street and Indiana Avenue. Meinburg said the moving trucks inspired the idea of her work and the materials she chose: paint and phone books.

“What better thing to represent population growth than a phone book?” said Meinburg, a third-year MFA student in sculpture. “I’m creating a parallel between mold growth and population or urban sprawl. Nature has a system of the way things grow and live, and I think humans do the same thing. They just don’t realize how closely we are to using those same systems.”

Meinburg traced a map of the northern Virginia and D.C. area, where she used to live, to get the piece’s background. She then rolled pieces of a phone book to make the look of mold. The piece took Meinburg all summer.

“For the fungus part, I probably worked on it for two solid months,” she said. “All I did all summer was roll paper and chop paper. Thank god for the public library and their video collection. I’d rent seven movies and watch them all day, then go back and rent seven more.”