By Josh Hughes
This quarter the Western Gallery features the exhibit “Back to the Sandbox: Art & Radical Pedagogy,” an unusual theme with equally unusual artwork. Running from now until March 23, the show also includes parallel lectures, summits and performances that fit with the theme.
“The exhibition is based on collaborations of prominent artists, scientists and educators and includes works of art, scientific and educational experiments, and archival material,” reads text from the exhibit’s entrance.
Pedagogy, defined as the method and practice of teaching, concerns the ways in which academic subjects are taught. The exhibit plays off of this theme by examining, through various media, the ways in which education interacts with art.
Never before have you seen both a sandpit and a mock kindergarten classroom inside a gallery space, I would imagine. Alongside documentary based video work and performance pieces, the exhibit explores the various ends and applications of education. The space itself has been thoroughly reimagined from last year’s exhibit, “Coded Threads.”
Independently curated by Jaroslav Anděl, the show hopes to both inspire future pedagogical work and examine current states of education.
“By asking radical questions, art becomes a radical pedagogy which transcends institutional boundaries and inspires mind-changing narratives,” Anděl said.
The exhibit is thematically divided into four different segments: the sandbox, kindergarten, primary and secondary education, and tertiary education. While the first two take up the majority of the space, the layout sets viewers up with a concrete, chronological sequence to walk through.
When walking into the gallery, the first thing you’ll see is likely a giant sandbox. Maybe there’s an elegant castle inside it, maybe an organic, hand-pressed figure or maybe no distinguishable structures at all. Alongside the wall rests a piece of text by architect Renzo Piano explaining, in logical steps, the directions on how to build a perfect sandcastle.
“Be clear about the fact that building a sandcastle is a totally useless operation. Don’t expect too much; it’s going to disappear, mainly because there’s no point in making the castle too far away from the sea,” it reads.
Not too far away is a video piece chronicling various sandcastles by the artist Calvin Seibart. His accompanying wall text provides a poignant thesis for most of the exhibit.
“I have always felt a connection to the Kindergarten movement, its aesthetic of primary color and basic shapes has informed the core of what I do. I always knew what I was about. I still make sandcastles,” Seibart writes.
Juxtaposed with a later video piece that follows an 8-year-old boy throughout a normal school day, the gallery addresses the complicated relationship between the imaginative aspects of primary education and the rigidity of curriculum.
The documentary by Ane Hjort Guttu explores the child’s conflicting emotions towards feeling free and creative and the tight framework that the school revolves around. It’s not as playful of a piece as one might imagine, and it also extends the idea of pedagogy beyond just the classroom and into society as a whole.
Elsewhere in the gallery viewers are encouraged to sit down at a round white table and let their imagination run wild in creating figures out of building blocks. On the wall hangs a large poster with DNA molecules and human skeletons composed of these exact blocks. On the table, however, there’s a giant dinosaur figure and complex geometrical shapes that owe more to origami than any anatomical composition.
This mock classroom is the work of Michael Joaquin Grey, an artist interested in the intersection of haptic, tactile language (as portrayed in the building blocks) and the complex, intelligent patterns of botany, zoology, ontogeny and ontology.
In his own words, “It’s a language to read complex and dynamic systems, a way to use body empathy. It’s learning from understanding how we are built: we are moving geometry.”
Elsewhere in the exhibit there is a photobooth, a video that features a woman running on a treadmill getting hit with dodgeballs, and a series of large-scale photos of children at various schools in the UK on recess.
The exhibit opens up not only questions about education (or radical pedagogy) in regards to art, but also in interdisciplinary practices and ideas. It’s less a pure art exhibit than an examination of the educational structures that exist around the world.
Last weekend Western held an “Art and Radical Pedagogy Black History Month Summit,” and the Western Gallery has also partnered with various Bellingham schools to reach beyond Western and into elementary school programs.
As students, we constantly make decisions and develop thought processes directly linked to our upbringing and developmental education. As students, we are still engaging with this system at Western, and for that, the exhibit rings more close to home than many previous shows in the gallery space.
Maybe in your next break between classes you’ll find yourself building a sandcastle on a college campus, thinking about how various education systems have brought you to where you are today.