Midwest Beer Belly Despair Blog

What is art these days? Rocks with mirrors on them. Located just south of the MacCollin Classroom building and Eppley Auditorium, Earth Mirrors, as strange a piece of sculpture as any seen by man, sits on a small hill hedged on two sides by parking lots and on the other a road. Ten rocks are set up in a triangular pattern on the hill, like over sized bowling pins waiting to be knocked over. The rocks are made of sandstone and there seems to be no discernible pattern to them other than their placement. The tallest stone stands at just about six foot six inches, and the smallest stone is just under three feet. Their girth ranges from a foot and a half to three feet wide. The cream colored stone is rough hewn and the angles of the cut, while not following any pattern, are obviously man made. Attached to each of the stones, is a piece of polished metal, cut to fit the outline of one side of the rock it’s mounted on. As with the shape of the rocks themselves, there seems to be no pattern as to where the mirrors are place on the stones.

The area around the standing stones leaves much to be desired as well. While there is no shade in and among the rocks themselves, there are trees on the side of the hill closest to the Eppley Auditorium. While providing some shade from the ever present sun, being under the trees is far from pleasant. Small, whining bugs continually fly about the ears, and the tree trunks are home to many ants who are not at all afraid to stake a claim on an unwary visitor. Breezes do roll in from the south, but their murmur through the branches is often interrupted and overpowered by a car parking nearby or the high pitched drone of a Kawasaki motorcycle zipping by on the road.

There isn’t even much history to the stones. According to a plaque set a few feet from the stones, the whole thing was made by someone named Andrea Stanislav and was only dedicated within this last year, on April 13, 2011. The whole place has a feeling of artificiality to it. The base of the rocks do not even have grass growing up to them. There is a four inch area of nothing but dirt around the rocks. It’s as if somebody was trying to create the illusion of antiquity but did an exceedingly sloppy job with it. So the question remains, what is art these days? The answer to that would take pages. However, in all those pages, Earth Mirrors would not be mentioned as art. Earth Mirrors would instead be mentioned as an example of swindling an institution out of money, and leaving an eyesore as a mark of a successful theft.