Tara GladdenDirector and Curator, Kohl Gallery
UNSETTLED
Exhibition Statement
The class of 2020 will forever be known as the Class of COVID-19. This group of graduating seniors is experiencing one of the most tumultuous times in recent history. Their education and their lives have been completely upended and placed on hold at the very moment they were scheduled to spread their wings.
Pandemic, social distancing, uncertain times, flatten the curve, stay safe, shelter at home, this is a war, economic collapse; these are just a few of the catch phrases that have echoed endlessly through our minds during this Age of COVID-19. We’re living in a time of reckoning; a collapse wrought with contradiction, filled with danger and devastation. Our values and our systems are being called into question and irrevocably challenged. Our vulnerabilities have been completely exposed; unpreparedness, inequality, and our reliance on supply chains far away and out of reach have immobilized us. We’ve reached a precipice that presents many looming questions. Who are we? What are we made of? Which direction will we take? What comes next? How do we continue when we live in a polarized world that is engaged in a struggle for the future? This struggle is one that exposes contradictory urges in human nature: empathy vs. violence, cooperation vs. competition, awareness vs. ignorance, care vs. neglect, love vs. hate, truth vs. lies, protection vs. disregard, transformation vs. stagnation, and the list goes on.
We haven’t reached a clincher; we’re on pause, placed in limbo, left to contemplate the choices and possibilities ahead of us. The students in this exhibition can see and feel exactly where we are, and have put together an exhibition that epitomizes our current zeitgeist. Collectively, they question the nature of control and encapsulate the contradictions, uncertainty, and polarization we’re currently experiencing in myriad ways. They remind us of our humanity, flexibility, our capacity to cooperate, re-envision, and rebuild. Despite the adversity this group of students has had to navigate, the work they bring forward is filled with concern, insight, and hope at a moment when everything feels completely UNSETTLED.
Drake Harrison and Heber Guerra-Recinos both present speculative works that veer toward science fiction; they question perceived realities and the consequences of human behavior while reminding us that our current actions have the capacity to transform the future. In Harrison’s Artifacts of the Anthropocene he takes on multiple reflexive roles of programmer, archeologist, and artist. He uses AI machine learning to imagine a future when humans are extinct and all that is left of our culture are traces of digital artifacts that have been pieced together by a computer he’s trained to excavate and synthesize our digital remains. The computer produces a series of digital images of mysterious objects that act as representations of our extinct culture. Harrison takes the cultural computing process a step further by “translating” these computer-generated images into physical form through a hands-on sculptural process using plaster and 3D printing. What results is a collection of objects that exist in both digital and physical form that situate themselves in an uncanny place caught between fiction and reality, cooperatively created by a machine and a man. The title of the work references human extinction as a result of the anthropocene making a critical statement about current human behavior. The idea of reconstructing culture from bits and pieces of digital artifacts speaks to our contemporary reliance on technology. The act of working with AI machine learning to create these objects investigates the limits of control we have as we program and use emerging technology to create new realities. Artifacts of the Anthropocene explores the contradictions and possibilities inherent in our relationship with technology and questions our impact on the environment, as it speculates possible futures.
Guerra-Recino’s work Retribution presents as a kind of absurd news report. It also functions within a future reality as it looks back on the current COVID-19 crisis. Guerra-Recinos presents a dystopic, violent stream of events in which individuals are punished for actions that disregarded the safety of others, bringing misfortune and death during the crisis. In this work, Guerra-Recinos skirts the line between absurdity and high drama, using exaggerated violence, torture, and death to draw attention to the dark side of humanity. He questions the role of the individual and critiques mob mentality in that all the gruesome sentences being enacted have been agreed and decided upon by a community. The punishments reference historical violent mob actions such as crucifixions and lynchings. Ultimately, Guerra-Recinos uses this absurd, violent report to illuminate the insanity of humanity’s cruelest actions, and as a strategy for condemnation of past, present, and future violence. He draws us toward empathy and urges us to consider our role in unfolding events.
Tatiana Baughman and Casey Wolhar poetically expose the beauty and messiness of the human experience. Their works meditate on the relationships we have with ourselves, with our loved ones, and with the world around us. They explore contradictory impulses such as holding on and letting go, navigating what we can and can’t control, and choosing between comfort and growth.
Wolhar’s video performance work, Unmovable Forces is an embodied, visual representation of struggle. In this work, Wolhar enacts various futile gestures that attempt to move the unmovable and change the inevitable. She is pictured laboring to move a tree, and various structural objects inside and outside her home. In this work, Wolhar explores ideas related to the internal/external and emotional/physical forces with which we all battle, demonstrating how we can work with or against ourselves. The video concludes with Wolhar releasing herself from these struggles. Her process brings to mind ideas such as being “in tune” with our internal timing, and the intuitive knowledge of knowing when to hold on and when to let go. Her work reminds us that as difficult as it may be to let go, it is inevitable to move forward. The process is a cycle that moves in stages: struggle, realization, acceptance and release, so that we might be free, to start over and begin anew.
Like Wolhar, Baughman’s work explores ideas related to our internal and external realities and what we can and can’t control. 6ft. Apart uses blossoms collected from trees that were planted by her parents at her family home to celebrate the births of all the children in the family. The blossoms are placed between two pieces of plexiglass with the sides left open and exposed to the elements. Baughman then paints on top of the surface of the plexiglass, following and obscuring the shape of the flowers beneath. The five pieces in the series represent Baughman and her four siblings. The pieces are placed on the road to her home six feet apart. In this work, Baughman uses flowers as a metaphor to represent the ephemerality of human life. The work subtly and poetically meditates on the inevitability of change as the flowers decompose and are slowly transformed beneath the surface of the plexiglass. The juxtaposition of the naturally decomposing flowers beneath the surface with the controlled unchanging paint on top sets up an interesting situation. The shifts that are occurring beneath the plexiglass are obscured by the intentional impressions constructed on top. It seems no matter how intentional we are with our actions, there are always things brewing out of sight over which we have no control. Placing these individual pieces six feet apart speaks to our current isolation and how each of us is twisting, turning, and transforming in our own little worlds, but doing our best to remain intact.
For Microscopic, Baughman created microscope slides of toilet paper, hand sanitizer, vitamins, and masks in order to get a closer view of the materials society has deemed most valuable during the COVID-19 crisis. This work again questions the nature of control, as if having enough of these items will keep us prepared and protected from the reality of the situation. Looking at these items under a microscope transforms them into subjects of scientific inquiry, drawing comparisons to how scientists and medical workers are trying desperately to decipher COVID-19. These scientific slides – mere circles of abstract patterns – are captured provisionally as video on an iPhone, interrupting and cutting off their full circular form. This detail draws further attention to how we’ve been cut off from life as we knew it. We’ve had to adjust and improvise to accommodate the current crisis, but things don’t feel quite whole.
Wenqi Yu and Hannah Powell create meditative, minimal works that employ repetitive actions as a strategy to explore ideas of cooperation and community, freedom and flexibility, empathy and the power found in accepting our shadows.
Wenqi Yu works with monochromatic concrete and plaster blocks he makes by hand. The blocks are the same shape and size and vary only minimally in color and detail. He repetitively stacks the blocks on top of and next to one another creating a process of sculptural building that is infinitely variable. His process embraces both restriction and freedom. He has confined himself to working with this one very specific, self-designed object that allows him to explore new possibilities each time he engages in the building process. This process is also a cooperative venture because technically, it requires another person to help build each structure. Although Yu takes the work very seriously, in some ways his process playfully evokes an elegant game of Lego. The structures he builds are reminiscent of urban skylines, but function in a place caught between reality and fantasy. In his process, he also works with light and shadow. His relationship to the shadows is reflexive; he moves between creating them and being guided by them to determine where to place the next block. His work embraces a series of opposites: restriction and freedom, seriousness and play, fantasy and reality, mirroring current polarities in profound ways. However, his process is decidedly optimistic and reminds us that we can design flexible systems and work together to build new structures. His use of shadow functions as a metaphor for intuitive knowledge; we can be guided by the knowledge that exists in our shadows, and this kind of heightened awareness can aid us as we make new choices.
Hannah Powell’s Lost in Thoughts urges us toward awareness and empathy. For this work, Powell collected commonly expressed positive and negative phrases. The process was one of repetitively writing these phrases. All of the negative phrases form the shape of a semicolon and all the positive phrases populate the area around the semicolon. She uses the semicolon as a symbol to remind us that no matter how difficult life may seem at any given moment, our stories are incomplete; we have the capacity to recover and change. The question is: What comes after your semicolon?
Caught within the confines of our current reality, all the works in this exhibition contemplate the limits of control and the infinite potential of an uncertain future. However, this group of budding artists have chosen resilience over defeat, hope over devastation, and profundity over the superficial. Their work is filled with the awareness of polarization, in-tune with all the questions and concerns of the current moment, and poetically preoccupied with human nature. As they process the present, they ask vital questions about our shared humanity and offer clues as to how we might move forward. They meditate on how the world is changing, how we are changing, and they ask us to consider our role in shaping the future. They expose outdated modes and models and imagine new realities, new behaviors, and new strategies. They prod us toward heightened awareness, human connection, and increased perspective. They illuminate the fragility of life, reminding us we are indeed UNSETTLED, but that our instability is an opportunity for transformation.
Tara Gladden, Director and Curator for Kohl Gallery, April 27, 2020
Exhibition Statement
The class of 2020 will forever be known as the Class of COVID-19. This group of graduating seniors is experiencing one of the most tumultuous times in recent history. Their education and their lives have been completely upended and placed on hold at the very moment they were scheduled to spread their wings.
Pandemic, social distancing, uncertain times, flatten the curve, stay safe, shelter at home, this is a war, economic collapse; these are just a few of the catch phrases that have echoed endlessly through our minds during this Age of COVID-19. We’re living in a time of reckoning; a collapse wrought with contradiction, filled with danger and devastation. Our values and our systems are being called into question and irrevocably challenged. Our vulnerabilities have been completely exposed; unpreparedness, inequality, and our reliance on supply chains far away and out of reach have immobilized us. We’ve reached a precipice that presents many looming questions. Who are we? What are we made of? Which direction will we take? What comes next? How do we continue when we live in a polarized world that is engaged in a struggle for the future? This struggle is one that exposes contradictory urges in human nature: empathy vs. violence, cooperation vs. competition, awareness vs. ignorance, care vs. neglect, love vs. hate, truth vs. lies, protection vs. disregard, transformation vs. stagnation, and the list goes on.
We haven’t reached a clincher; we’re on pause, placed in limbo, left to contemplate the choices and possibilities ahead of us. The students in this exhibition can see and feel exactly where we are, and have put together an exhibition that epitomizes our current zeitgeist. Collectively, they question the nature of control and encapsulate the contradictions, uncertainty, and polarization we’re currently experiencing in myriad ways. They remind us of our humanity, flexibility, our capacity to cooperate, re-envision, and rebuild. Despite the adversity this group of students has had to navigate, the work they bring forward is filled with concern, insight, and hope at a moment when everything feels completely UNSETTLED.
Drake Harrison and Heber Guerra-Recinos both present speculative works that veer toward science fiction; they question perceived realities and the consequences of human behavior while reminding us that our current actions have the capacity to transform the future. In Harrison’s Artifacts of the Anthropocene he takes on multiple reflexive roles of programmer, archeologist, and artist. He uses AI machine learning to imagine a future when humans are extinct and all that is left of our culture are traces of digital artifacts that have been pieced together by a computer he’s trained to excavate and synthesize our digital remains. The computer produces a series of digital images of mysterious objects that act as representations of our extinct culture. Harrison takes the cultural computing process a step further by “translating” these computer-generated images into physical form through a hands-on sculptural process using plaster and 3D printing. What results is a collection of objects that exist in both digital and physical form that situate themselves in an uncanny place caught between fiction and reality, cooperatively created by a machine and a man. The title of the work references human extinction as a result of the anthropocene making a critical statement about current human behavior. The idea of reconstructing culture from bits and pieces of digital artifacts speaks to our contemporary reliance on technology. The act of working with AI machine learning to create these objects investigates the limits of control we have as we program and use emerging technology to create new realities. Artifacts of the Anthropocene explores the contradictions and possibilities inherent in our relationship with technology and questions our impact on the environment, as it speculates possible futures.
Guerra-Recino’s work Retribution presents as a kind of absurd news report. It also functions within a future reality as it looks back on the current COVID-19 crisis. Guerra-Recinos presents a dystopic, violent stream of events in which individuals are punished for actions that disregarded the safety of others, bringing misfortune and death during the crisis. In this work, Guerra-Recinos skirts the line between absurdity and high drama, using exaggerated violence, torture, and death to draw attention to the dark side of humanity. He questions the role of the individual and critiques mob mentality in that all the gruesome sentences being enacted have been agreed and decided upon by a community. The punishments reference historical violent mob actions such as crucifixions and lynchings. Ultimately, Guerra-Recinos uses this absurd, violent report to illuminate the insanity of humanity’s cruelest actions, and as a strategy for condemnation of past, present, and future violence. He draws us toward empathy and urges us to consider our role in unfolding events.
Tatiana Baughman and Casey Wolhar poetically expose the beauty and messiness of the human experience. Their works meditate on the relationships we have with ourselves, with our loved ones, and with the world around us. They explore contradictory impulses such as holding on and letting go, navigating what we can and can’t control, and choosing between comfort and growth.
Wolhar’s video performance work, Unmovable Forces is an embodied, visual representation of struggle. In this work, Wolhar enacts various futile gestures that attempt to move the unmovable and change the inevitable. She is pictured laboring to move a tree, and various structural objects inside and outside her home. In this work, Wolhar explores ideas related to the internal/external and emotional/physical forces with which we all battle, demonstrating how we can work with or against ourselves. The video concludes with Wolhar releasing herself from these struggles. Her process brings to mind ideas such as being “in tune” with our internal timing, and the intuitive knowledge of knowing when to hold on and when to let go. Her work reminds us that as difficult as it may be to let go, it is inevitable to move forward. The process is a cycle that moves in stages: struggle, realization, acceptance and release, so that we might be free, to start over and begin anew.
Like Wolhar, Baughman’s work explores ideas related to our internal and external realities and what we can and can’t control. 6ft. Apart uses blossoms collected from trees that were planted by her parents at her family home to celebrate the births of all the children in the family. The blossoms are placed between two pieces of plexiglass with the sides left open and exposed to the elements. Baughman then paints on top of the surface of the plexiglass, following and obscuring the shape of the flowers beneath. The five pieces in the series represent Baughman and her four siblings. The pieces are placed on the road to her home six feet apart. In this work, Baughman uses flowers as a metaphor to represent the ephemerality of human life. The work subtly and poetically meditates on the inevitability of change as the flowers decompose and are slowly transformed beneath the surface of the plexiglass. The juxtaposition of the naturally decomposing flowers beneath the surface with the controlled unchanging paint on top sets up an interesting situation. The shifts that are occurring beneath the plexiglass are obscured by the intentional impressions constructed on top. It seems no matter how intentional we are with our actions, there are always things brewing out of sight over which we have no control. Placing these individual pieces six feet apart speaks to our current isolation and how each of us is twisting, turning, and transforming in our own little worlds, but doing our best to remain intact.
For Microscopic, Baughman created microscope slides of toilet paper, hand sanitizer, vitamins, and masks in order to get a closer view of the materials society has deemed most valuable during the COVID-19 crisis. This work again questions the nature of control, as if having enough of these items will keep us prepared and protected from the reality of the situation. Looking at these items under a microscope transforms them into subjects of scientific inquiry, drawing comparisons to how scientists and medical workers are trying desperately to decipher COVID-19. These scientific slides – mere circles of abstract patterns – are captured provisionally as video on an iPhone, interrupting and cutting off their full circular form. This detail draws further attention to how we’ve been cut off from life as we knew it. We’ve had to adjust and improvise to accommodate the current crisis, but things don’t feel quite whole.
Wenqi Yu and Hannah Powell create meditative, minimal works that employ repetitive actions as a strategy to explore ideas of cooperation and community, freedom and flexibility, empathy and the power found in accepting our shadows.
Wenqi Yu works with monochromatic concrete and plaster blocks he makes by hand. The blocks are the same shape and size and vary only minimally in color and detail. He repetitively stacks the blocks on top of and next to one another creating a process of sculptural building that is infinitely variable. His process embraces both restriction and freedom. He has confined himself to working with this one very specific, self-designed object that allows him to explore new possibilities each time he engages in the building process. This process is also a cooperative venture because technically, it requires another person to help build each structure. Although Yu takes the work very seriously, in some ways his process playfully evokes an elegant game of Lego. The structures he builds are reminiscent of urban skylines, but function in a place caught between reality and fantasy. In his process, he also works with light and shadow. His relationship to the shadows is reflexive; he moves between creating them and being guided by them to determine where to place the next block. His work embraces a series of opposites: restriction and freedom, seriousness and play, fantasy and reality, mirroring current polarities in profound ways. However, his process is decidedly optimistic and reminds us that we can design flexible systems and work together to build new structures. His use of shadow functions as a metaphor for intuitive knowledge; we can be guided by the knowledge that exists in our shadows, and this kind of heightened awareness can aid us as we make new choices.
Hannah Powell’s Lost in Thoughts urges us toward awareness and empathy. For this work, Powell collected commonly expressed positive and negative phrases. The process was one of repetitively writing these phrases. All of the negative phrases form the shape of a semicolon and all the positive phrases populate the area around the semicolon. She uses the semicolon as a symbol to remind us that no matter how difficult life may seem at any given moment, our stories are incomplete; we have the capacity to recover and change. The question is: What comes after your semicolon?
Caught within the confines of our current reality, all the works in this exhibition contemplate the limits of control and the infinite potential of an uncertain future. However, this group of budding artists have chosen resilience over defeat, hope over devastation, and profundity over the superficial. Their work is filled with the awareness of polarization, in-tune with all the questions and concerns of the current moment, and poetically preoccupied with human nature. As they process the present, they ask vital questions about our shared humanity and offer clues as to how we might move forward. They meditate on how the world is changing, how we are changing, and they ask us to consider our role in shaping the future. They expose outdated modes and models and imagine new realities, new behaviors, and new strategies. They prod us toward heightened awareness, human connection, and increased perspective. They illuminate the fragility of life, reminding us we are indeed UNSETTLED, but that our instability is an opportunity for transformation.
Tara Gladden, Director and Curator for Kohl Gallery, April 27, 2020
