Western Gallery offers intimate look at BFA graduate exhibition
This fall the Western Gallery hosts the exhibition “In-Site: A New Realism.” The exhibition comprises the capstone work of the ten Bachelor of Fine Arts ("BFA") artists who graduated in the spring of 2020. Due to the pandemic, this exhibition was postponed from spring quarter of 2020.
In following Western’s Safe Start policies for the Fall 2020 quarter, the Western Gallery remains closed to the general public, but it is open by appointment for educational purposes to WWU faculty, staff, and students. Emphasis will therefore be placed on online programming.
The week of Oct. 5, the exhibiting artists will give talks accessible via Zoom and Facebook Live. Landis will host one-on-one Q & A with the artists in the gallery as part of the presentation. Please register for the talks by selecting any of the events listed on the exhibition web page. Each event will have a registration link.
The artists represented in "In Site: A New Realism" use diverse and deeply personal visual strategies to conjure new modes of perceiving past and present reality. The exhibition comprises the culminating projects created by students graduating from Western's year-long BFA Studio Art program. Spanning a range of media from photography, sculpture, painting, video, printmaking, textile, and installation, each artist seeks to restructure a site or memory’s realism as an investigation of history and identity.
Today, our personal and lived realities continue to shift through the COVID-19 pandemic. Stepping into each of these bodies of work we are reminded of the power of revisiting sites that currently feel out of reach. Artist Jean Tinguely, a member of the New Realists, declared that “art is the distortion of an unendurable reality… Art is correction, modification of a situation; art is communication, connection… Art is social, self-sufficient, and total.” Respectively, each of these exhibiting artists has leveraged their practices as a means to expose new modes of remembering, enduring, and communicating realities past and present.
The Western Gallery is open by appointment only for educational purposes to WWU faculty, staff, and students. If you are a faculty, staff, or student interested in setting up an appointment to visit the Gallery, please email Tami Landis. Appointments are available Sept. 23 through Nov. 20 during the following days/hours: Mondays: 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.; Tuesdays and Wednesdays: 1-5 p.m.; and Thursdays: from noon to 4 p.m.