By Josh Hughes
“Thinking Through Making,” the most recent Faculty Biennial exhibit at Western, will be running at the Western Gallery through May 8. The exhibit, which focuses on and highlights work from various faculty within the art department, has no centralized motif other than appreciation of the well-made, finished object. The exhibit also marks the second to last show at the gallery of the school year; the BFA Studio Exhibition opens on May 18 and runs for the rest of the quarter.
The art that comprises “Thinking Through Making” ranges from ideologically challenging mixed media pieces to photography and kinetic sculpture. There’s a mishmash of styles, voices, ideas and mediums that hasn’t existed within the Western Gallery for quite some time. Since the show only runs every two years, it gives professors a chance to showcase their best work over an extended period of time while they additionally teach the rising class of art students.
Joshua McDevitt’s photography focuses on crisp details like the intricacies in a beard and the mundane beauty of locker rooms, whereas Nathan Cranston’s photos fill the viewer with a sense of longing in their depictions of San Xavier Del Bac, a Spanish Catholic Mission in Arizona. Margot Myers’s “Ugashik” blends etching, relief and screen printing to achieve a complex final image, yet it has absolutely nothing to do with Cynthia Camlin’s fractured painting “Island of Ought and Nought” right next to it.
ABOVE: Cynthia Camlin’s “The Island of Ought and Nought.” Photo by Ricky Rath // AS Review.
Seiko A. Purdue’s “Hyoga (Glacier)” takes up the largest space of the gallery as an installation piece that uses shibori techniques on polyester fabric to create a sense of melting glaciers. Adversely, Sebastian Mendes’s “Untitled” takes up an impeccably small portion of the gallery; an inverted steel piece of the Battleship USS New Jersey quietly rests in the top corner of part of the gallery space. Elsewhere, Barbara Sternberger experiments with abstract impressionism and Doug Loewen crafts an intricate kinetic dancer made up of wire and exquisite engineering.
One of the most important sects of the gallery, however, is a separate room that showcases retiring professor Elsi Vassdal Ellis’s chronology of artists’ books that exemplify her unrivaled taste for good design. Her segment in the exhibit alone could take hours to sift through, with each document containing intricacies, clever typefaces and book layouts.
Considering this marks the last week for two years that students get to see a succinct survey of the art faculty’s work, be sure to make your way over to the Western Gallery. If you’ve only got a few minutes between classes, it’s well worth even the shortest visit. The Western Gallery, located in the south side of the art building, is open Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Wednesdays 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., and Saturdays 12 to 4 p.m.