Month: February 2019

On Monday, February 18, 2019 artist, Sky Hopinka, gave a talk in conjunction with the exhibition, Audible Bacillus, which includes his work Anti-Objects, or Space Without Path or Boundary.
Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk/Pechanga) was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington and spent a number of years in Palm Springs and Riverside, California; Portland, Oregon; and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He is currently based out of Cambridge, Massachusetts. In Portland, he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the lower Columbia River basin. His video work centers around personal positions of indigenous homeland and landscape, designs of language as containers of culture, and the play between the known and the unknowable. He received his Bachelor of Arts from Portland State University in Liberal Arts, and his Master of Fine Arts in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He is currently a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellow for 2019.

Photos by Richard Marinelli. Click here to view the full album on Flickr.

On Thursday, February 7, 2019 the opening reception for Bestiary was held at the Davison Art Center, with a gallery talk by Kari Weil, University Professor, Environmental Studies, College of the Environment and College of Letters, and Co-Coordinator, Animal Studies, and author of “Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now” (Columbia, 2012).

Bestiary takes its inspiration from medieval compendia of wondrous creatures, both natural and fantastic. This exhibition stages creaturely encounters between gallery visitors and their non-human counterparts. In viewing these works, we might wonder at changing conceptions of bestial subjectivity across different cultural contexts and movements including the Renaissance, Romanticism, Surrealism, and our own contemporary moment. Works in this exhibition include an anonymous fifteenth-century engraving of a lion, a dragon, and a fox quarreling; a monumental lobster by Richard Mueller; and an ethereal anemone by Kiki Smith.

The exhibition will be on display through Thursday, March 7, 2019.

Photos by Richard Marinelli. Click here to view the full album on Flickr.

On Thursday, January 31, 2019 the opening reception for Sound of Korea, curated by Phoebe Junghee Shin, was held at the College of East Asian Studies Gallery at Mansfield Freeman Center. The exhibition presented five landscape photographs by Young-Il Kim as well as two single-channel videos. His photography became well-known when he did some official photography related to the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics.

The exhibition will be on display through Saturday, May 25, 2019.

Photos by Sandy Aldieri. Click here to view the full album on Flickr.

On Tuesday, January 29, 2019 the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery hosted the opening reception for Audible Bacillus, an exhibition curated by Benjamin Chaffee, Associate Director of Visual Arts at the Wesleyan Center for the Arts.

Audible Bacillus posits a reconnection of our consciousness from the inside out, presenting our coexistence at a metaphoric register rather than representing or speaking for the beings within us. The works were presented not as practical scientific rhetoric but rather as investigations in their own right into a variety of themes including alternative epistemologies, the nature and source of volition, a breakdown of the boundary between self/other, the limits of our language(s), and into the radical care we need to sustain a future. Stromatolites, the fossilized remains of ancient cyanobacteria, the dominant species on the Earth billions of years ago, were also included in the exhibition.

The exhibition will be on display through Sunday, March 3, 2019.

Photos by Sara McCrea ‘21. Click here to view the full album on Flickr.