In-Site: A New Realism

The annual BFA exhibition ​​​​​​is comprised of the culminating projects created by students graduating from WWUs year-long BFA program. The 10 artists represented in this show have created bodies of work that attempt to evoke new ways of perceiving reality. Spanning a range of media from photography, sculpture, painting,​ video, printmaking, and installation each artist seeks to restructure a site or subjective memory to incite new modes of understanding the past and the present.

Open by appointment for students, faculty, and staff of Western

Email Tami Landis to learn about accessing the exhibition and to make an appointment to visit.

Artist Talk Series, Fall 2020

This fall the Western Gallery will be showcasing the culminating work of the 10 Bachelor of Fine Arts ("BFA") artists from the 2020 Spring cohort in the exhibition "In-Site: A New Realism." Due to the pandemic, this exhibition was postponed from the spring quarter to the fall of 2020. We are pleased to install the dynamic bodies of work that exemplify the perseverance of the artists during a challenging final spring quarter.

The week of Oct. 5, the exhibiting artists will give talks accessible via Zoom and Facebook Live. We invite the community to join these virtual presentations. We will host a Q & A with the artist in the gallery as part of the presentation. To join us for the talks, please register for the talks by selecting any of the events listed on this page. Each event will have a registration link.

The artists represented in "In Site: A New Realism" use diverse and deeply personal visual strategies to conjure new modes of perceiving past and present reality. This exhibition comprises the culminating projects created by 10 students graduating from Western's year-long BFA Studio Art program. Spanning a range of media from photography, sculpture, painting, ​video, printmaking, textile, and installation, each artist seeks to restructure a site or memory’s realism as an investigation of history and identity.

Today, our personal and lived realities continue to shift through the COVID-19 pandemic. Stepping into each of these bodies of work we are reminded of the power of revisiting sites that currently feel out of reach. Artist Jean Tinguely, a member of the New Realists, once declared that “Art is the distortion of an unendurable reality… Art is correction, modification of a situation; art is communication, connection… Art is social, self-sufficient, and total.” Respectively, each of these exhibiting artists has leveraged their practices as a means to expose new modes of remembering, enduring, and communicating realities past and present.

Catalog

More information, and events for In-Site: A New Realism - Art Studio BFA Exhibition 2020.