Month: January 2019

Posted on by Art Department Faculty Scholarship and Creative Work, News and Events, Uncategorized

New Gallery Shows Opening This Week

We have three great exhibitions opening in the University Art Gallery this week.

Retrospective: Wynne Wilbur – in the Main Gallery

Wynne Wilbur, Flower (2017).  Image courtesy of the artist.

View a career-spanning retrospective of work created by Truman ceramics professor Wynne Wilbur.

Emily Nickel, Undoing. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Dreamwork: New Work by ceramicists Leah Bowring, Emily Nickel, and Alexander Thierry – in the Main Gallery

Dreamwork features three ceramic artists, Truman alumni all, who encompass a broad range of approaches to ceramics: Leah Bowring, Emily Nickel, Alexander Thierry. Dreamwork refers to the psychoanalytic concept that our unconscious often disguises truths in our dreams from our conscious mind, but, more broadly, the works in this exhibition address the work the mind undertakes when creating memories, fantasizing, meditating, and dreaming.

Harry Tjutjuna, Wati Nyiru Munu Wati Wanka. Photo courtesy of the University of Virginia.

Claiming Country: Western Desert Painting from the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection – in the Charlyn Gallery (Exhibition on view until March 22).The Western Desert, located in west central Australia, is home to many of Australia’s indigenous communities and is seen as the birthplace of the contemporary Aboriginal art movement. Indigenous Australian art is often based on Dreamings, called Tjukurrpa in the Western Desert region. Dreamings link Aboriginal peoples to their sacred lands, often referred to as Country, through narratives of ancestors and creator beings. Western Desert artists bridge the gap between traditional Aboriginal practices and the contemporary art world by expressing Tjukurrpa in their work through ceremonial iconography and aerial perspectives of sacred landscapes associated with creator beings and ancestors. The paintings in Claiming Country explore the essential role that Country plays in the identities of Indigenous Australians. This exhibition brings together paintings by prominent Western Desert artists Pansy Napangardi, Makinti Napanangka, Weaver Jack, Harry Tjutjuna, Kathleen Petyarre, Tjumpo Tjapanangka, and Paddy Japaljarri Sims.

These works have graciously been loaned to Truman State University from the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia, the only museum outside of Australia dedicated to the exhibition and study of Indigenous Australian art.

Opening reception for all three of these exhibitions will take place Friday, January 25, 6:00-8:00 p.m.

 

Posted on by Art Department Department, Faculty Scholarship and Creative Work, News and Events, Uncategorized

Welcome Back! With snowy images from new Lindsey Dunnagan show

Truman’s Spring 2019 semester begins on Monday.  We are getting about six inches of snow before classes start, so be safe as you come back to campus.

Moonlit Crossing, courtesy of the artist.

Painting professor Lindsey Dunnagan begins 2019 with a new show in the Twin Cities area (in Silverwood Park, Saint Anthony, on the northern side of Minneapolis). Her exhibition, “Skimming Boundaries,” was rooted in her experience with her grandmother, who battled Alzheimer’s Disease for the last ten years of her life.

In her artist’s statement, Professor Dunnagan writes:

A Familiar Face, courtesy of the artist.

 

In the beginning, her illness showed in small ways as she repeated stories she told just days before.  Toward the middle of the disease, she began reinventing the history of her life. Toward the end, my grandmother didn’t know who I was.  She lost the ability to recognize family.  Conversations with her became circular as her short-term memory began to fail as well.  In the moments when the recognizable parts of her seemed to flicker in and out, I often wondered where she had gone.  It seemed as if a part of her was testing the waters of another realm even though her physical body remained vital.

 

In this series, I explore the intangible world of the spirit and the boundary that separates us. Religion maps out worlds of before and after death, but even the most secular are confronted these questions. What is the journey between life and death?  Where are the edges?  In this series, I search for what is felt but unseen.

Blinking Current, courtesy of the artist.

Much of the work experiments with natural dyes, a technique I learned while serving in Morocco as a Peace Corps Volunteer.  Vegetation such as raspberries and cabbage are boiled and poured over mordanted paper, resulting in permanent reds, blues, and greens.  Rocks and black walnuts provide tones of sepia and simultaneously act as a resist, allowing the places they weigh down in the paper to remain white.  Sometimes paper is buried overnight and exposed to the rain or wrapped around trees to capture the imprint of bark.

The dying process, courtesy of Lindsey Dunnagan.

Stay tuned for all the exciting events coming up this spring semester at Truman.  And Welcome Back!