Gallery East Press Release
The work of seven Brigham Young University (BYU) artists will be on exhibition at Gallery East during the month of September. The exhibit, entitled “Expanding Methodologies,” will feature screen prints, a printing process made famous by Andy Warhol in the 1960s and 70s, created by two BYU art faculty and their graduate students from Sept. 5-29 in the Central Instruction Building on the Utah State University Eastern campus.
Professors Jen Watson and Fidalis Buehler directed the project in addition to making work for the exhibition. “The purpose of this exhibition was to provide graduate students and faculty an opportunity to make artwork outside the normal bounds of their own practice,” they explained. “This allows each person to expand knowledge and skill in new areas of methodology.”
Five graduate students, including Mary Ann Crabtree, Melanie Fischer, Samantha Snyder, Megan Rowley Stern and Eugene Tapahe, will share their work invoking the popular print process.
Crabtree chose to create an ode to her child-rearing years, a time often fraught with food mayhem, with (in addition to her screen prints) “an installation of mostly ceramic sculptural groupings of common, larger-than-life scale forms representative of typical foodstuffs associated with children.”
Fischer, who was born and raised in Germany and is now living in Provo, is inspired by the two cultures in which she has resided. She attempts to capture “details, intersections, and momentary situations that are easily overseen or taken for granted.”
Snyder, a California native, explained that “experience with reclusion and detachment often creates an eerie and uncanny space that beckons to be explored. My artwork is a physical system of this search through repeated, obsessive iterations of applying paint, tearing, collage and destruction.”
Rowley Stern believes that “nourishing her creative passions and nurturing her family are inextricably intertwined.” She is a multidisciplinary artist who responds to her daily life via video, installation, painting and soft sculpture.
Tapahe draws inspiration from his Diné (Navajo) traditions and modern experiences to bridge the complexities of two worlds by portraying “the fragility and resilience of Native American culture in these opposing realms” and unifying this dual existence in his concepts.
Professor Buehler is known for creating “complex representations of identity through American and South Pacific tradition, with each piece becoming a self-portrait of fear, anxiety, mythology, dreams, revelation, magic, mysticism and ritual.”
Professor Watson creates work that recognizes the past and present of human growth from childhood to adulthood simultaneously in a space that “reveals itself as objects, portraits, landscape and particular atmospheres as metaphors that hover through a threshold of magic realism.”
“While the work takes on new and differing results, the concepts for each artist remain largely the same. Each artist filters their concepts through the screen-printing process and allows for new things to emerge,” explained Buehler and Watson. “This exhibition is part of an ongoing and changing collection of prints that will be shown in several locations in the coming years.”
USU Eastern in Price is one of the stopping points on a traveling exhibition tour to Glendale Community College in Glendale, Arizona, and Modern West Fine Art in Salt Lake City, Utah.
“Expanding Methodologies” will be on view through Sept. 29. The artists will be at Gallery East for a reception and gallery talk on Friday, Sept. 8, from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Students, faculty, staff and the public are invited. The gallery is located in the Central Instruction Building.
The gallery is free and open to the public during the academic year. Gallery East’s hours are Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Closed weekends and holidays.
For questions, contact Noel Carmack at (435) 613-5241 or by email at noel.carmack@usu.edu.
