Art & Design Graduate Student Exhibition Featuring Master's Work Opens 11/19

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Peck School of the Arts announces the opening of the Department of Art & Design's Fall MA/MFA Exhibition on November 19th. Featuring installations of artworks by Andrea Avery, Robert Johnson, Nirmal Raja and Joseph Weber, the exhibition represents their graduate work in the Peck School of the Arts' Department of Art & Design.

Running through December 11th at the Inova/Arts Center Gallery at 2400 E. Kenwood Blvd., visitors to the exhibition will have the opportunity to see the following art installations:

Andrea Avery, Turn Our Faces West
This latest exhibition of works by Avery includes a monumental sculpture made of acquired square-dancing petticoats, larger-than-life paper dolls, and hand-sewn narratives on found objects, which physically surround viewers through movement of line within the gallery space. This collection investigates the experience of translocation, memories of childhood, and Avery's responses to actual events.

Robert Johnson, Allusive Terrains
Johnson's mixed media installation explores the malleable and mythical nature of collective memory; Johnson attempts to recreate the intangible and transcendent terrain of his and others' shared experience. His process includes gathering images from photo albums on the Internet and creating appropriated montages via a 19th-century wet plate collodion process. The seemingly evanescent ambrotypes, as well as the treatment of their handmade mountings, are evocative of ritualistic artifacts and anthropological displays. Stemming from a fascination with collective remembrance, Johnson engages such phenomenon through simulation. His work utilizes fact and fabrication to address the interdependent relationships between the past and present, permanence and impermanence, recollection and reconstruction.

Nirmal Raja, Continuum
Raja's current body of work includes mixed media works in different variations of the scroll format. Using the chance discovery of player piano rolls as a point of departure, Raja explores visual representation of time and memory in her work. Born in India, Raja has lived and traveled in several countries. Raja finds her inspiration in the complex relationship between the East and the West. Her work investigates the connections between individual and universal experience.

Joseph Weber,Cognition
Weber's work plays out the tensions between memory, association and experience in a kind of pseudoscientific experiment addressing all the senses. In Cognition, he uses river water as both metaphor and physical remembrance. Water functions as both nurturing and contaminating, and always as a record of its surrounding environment.

The opening reception for the Fall MA/MFA Exhibition takes place on November 19 from 5-7pm at the Inova/Arts Center Gallery, 2400 E. Kenwood Boulevard. There will also be a Gallery Talk given by the artists on November 23 from 4-6pm. The show will run through December 11. Gallery hours are Tuesday-Saturday, 11 am-4 pm. Admission is free.

 

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