For most curious students, viewing the work of their professors requires a lot of pilfering through dense academic journals and at least a trip or two to the university library. For those students in UB's visual studies department, getting a first-hand look at their professors' scholarly output only takes a trip to a remarkable art gallery.
Last Thursday marked the opening of Visual Epistemologies, a faculty exhibition for UB's visual studies department at Anderson Gallery. The exhibit is truly a testament to the talent and effort of the whole department: not only is every featured work the product of tremendous creative exertion on their part, but the show was also organized and curated entirely by visual studies faculty as well.
"It's been over a year in the making," said Gary Nickard, a clinical assistant professor in the visual studies department and the exhibition's co-organizer. "[But] putting this together has been a real pleasure."
The time and effort involved in the exhibition wasn't lost on the plethora of visual arts students that attended the Thursday reception, many of whom were curious to finally get a glimpse of their instructors' professional output.
"It's amazing to finally be able to see my teachers' work," said Erin Kuhn, a senior fine art major. "My teachers are always critiquing me, and [now] I finally get to see what their work is like and how it corresponds to my own work."
Kuhn's professors and their collective body of work can be best described by one adjective: diverse. On display at the Anderson Gallery was a cornucopia of contemporary art in mediums ranging from audio-visual multimedia displays to unconventional sculptures to more familiar work in oil paint and ink.
The ostensible theme of Visual Epistemologies – with epistemology being "the branch of philosophy that grapples with how we come to know and understand the world," according to the statement Elizabeth Otto, the event's other co-organizer, authored for the exhibit – was prominently reflected in the displayed works, both implicitly and explicitly.
How I Stopped Worrying…, a series of sculptures by Professor Adele Henderson, is arguably the piece that errs most on the explicit side of things. Sculpted globes representing various failed epistemologies of the past – from a cranial phrenology chart to a blown-up map of an ideologically-divided Korea – are displayed below a modern world map with handwritten notes regarding global corporatism and international politics. The piece forces the viewer to evaluate the organizing principles of the world today through the critical lens provided by the globe-shaped failures and mistakes of the past.
The imagery and aesthetic of the postmodern, consumerist West is another commonality between many of the pieces. Documents, a work by Assistant Professor Joan Linder, is made up of a tabletop of facsimile junk mail, bills and coupons hand-drawn in ink. The tension between the expectations created by the title and the reality of the piece itself make the viewer contemplate the nature and substance of the ‘documents' his or her culture will leave for posterity.
Also on display are a number of inventive audio-visual multimedia pieces. Representative among them is Associate Professor Sylvie Bélanger's Les fins de l'image, which consists of a video narrative projected onto the blank, white pages of a book accompanied by an audio recording. The audio aspect of the piece is projected through just a single pair of headphones, effectively creating an exchange between the single viewer and the work.
As diverse as Visual Epistemologies is, the unity and coherence of the exhibition remains uncompromised.
"This fit together better than expected," Nickard said. "It really speaks to the work of the department…[we're] a close-knit group with similar interests."
Visual Epistemologies will be on display at the Anderson Gallery until Oct. 26. The gallery is open Wednesday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and on Sundays from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.
Email: arts@ubspectrum.com
