Updates and reflections from Wesleyan's Center for the Arts in Middletown, Connecticut
On Saturday, March 9, 2019 an opening reception was held for the 38th annual Middletown Public Schools Art Exhibition at Wesleyan, which has taken place in the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery since 1982.
Photos by Sandy Aldieri of Perceptions Photography. Click here to view the full album on Flickr.
On Sunday, March 3, 2019 A performance by Los Angeles-based experimental music group lucky dragons and Wesleyan community members took place on the final day of the Audible Bacillus exhibition.
Other Transformations is an experiment. It asks: What is fundamentally necessary for an image to be read as music? How do images translate between musical idea, performance, and the experience of listening? By sourcing from a vast archive of graphic musical representations, can we discover common patterns to use as access points and guidelines for performance? By reducing symbolic musical language to its basic forms, interpolating between different representations, and generating hybrids, mimics, and transitional shapes, what new models can we build for thinking musically with images?
Photos by Richard Marinelli. Click here to view the full album on Flickr.
On Saturday, March 2, 2019 As part of the symposium Canonicity Revisited, Archaeologies of Knowledge featured talks by Kishwar Rizvi from Yale University, and Claire Grace and Benjamin Chafee, both from Wesleyan University. The symposium was envisioned as a critical interrogation of the problem of canons and canonicity in art history. This subject was a matter of intense debate in the mid 1990s, unfurling across the pages of a number of major publications in the field. By then, revisionist approaches had already begun to transform the discipline’s operating assumptions about what constitutes its canonical texts and artifacts, and about the very meaning and value of canonicity itself. Art history’s reevaluation has only increased in recent years thanks to the crucial work, now decades in the making, of feminist, postcolonial, and queer interventions, and to the development of visual and cultural studies. Nevertheless, it seems to us that canons and their variants in many ways still shape—or perhaps haunt—both the teaching and scholarship of art history. What accounts for their persistence? And how do they bear down on art historical thinking today?
Photos by Richard Marinelli. Click here to view the full album on Flickr.
On Tuesday, February 5, 2019 a walk through the exhibition Audible Bacillus took place with Smith Curator of Paleontology of the Joe Webb Peoples Museum of Natural History, Harold T. Stearns Professor of Integrative Sciences, and Research Professor, Earth and Environmental Sciences Ellen Thomas; Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow for Writing in the Social Sciences Tess Bird; Professor of Art Jeffrey Schiff; and Curator and Associate Director of Visual Arts Benjamin Chaffee.
Photos by Sandy Aldieri of Perceptions Photography. Click here to view the full album on Flickr.
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.
On Tuesday, January 22 and Wednesday, January 23, 2019 a 40-minute, intimate, immersive theater experience for ten audience members curated and crafted by the “Immersive Theater” Winter Session class and Visiting Instructor Tom Pearson, co-artistic director of Third Rail Projects, was shown at the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery. Because of the immersive nature of this piece, audiences stood for several minutes at a time over the course of the performance, and were also required to navigate several flights of stairs. Audiences were encouraged to wear comfortable shoes. Environments included water and chalk that could potentially have stained clothing or shoes.
Photos by Sandy Aldieri. Click here to view the full album on Flickr.
On Saturday, November 10, 2018 His Excellency Sri Sultan Hamengkubuwono X of Indonesia gave the keynote address for a symposium focusing on the dynamic interaction between the state and the Javanese ethnic group. There are hundreds of traditional performing arts in Indonesia, each associated with a specific ethnic group/sub-group and the geographical region that is the ethnic group’s homeland (e.g., the performing arts of Batak, Minangkabau, Aceh, Sunda, Central Java, East Java, Banyuwangi, etc.). The history of the Indonesian archipelago is one of myriad inter-cultural encounters between these groups alternately defined by geography, ethnic identity, and political affiliation. The processes of hybridization that have resulted have profoundly influenced Indonesian culture and attempts to shape Indonesian national identity. The performing arts play a primary role in articulating these interacting cultural, social, and political forces.
Photos by Sandy Aldieri. Click here to view the full album on Flickr.
