Upcoming Exhibition
April 22 - May 10, 2008
Senior Art Majors Exhibition (title TBA)
“what distance back to truth”
Reception Friday, April 11, at 4:30 pm
The University Art Gallery at the University of the South, Sewanee, will close the 2007-2008 exhibition year with a selection of work by Sewanee’s senior art majors. “what distance back to truth” will open on Tuesday, April 22nd at 4:30 pm with two artists’ talks and a reception.
The graduating seniors featured in this exhibition share a discomfort with taking the given world at face value. As photographer Amy Johnson writes in the group’s collective artist statement, “We feel that there is a growing disconnect between what we see and hear, and what is actually going on... We cannot help but to feel as though we are touching the branches of a problem, but the roots are nowhere to be found.” In Johnson’s photographic work, she captures fleeting impressions of her family members and the landscape of their family farm, as if she might better understand her reality by distilling it through the lens of her camera.
These sentiments echo in the work of Johnson’s classmates. Angela Berry, also a photographer, is concerned with the act of looking closely, at times obliquely, at the things she encounters as a way of
questioning the known and breaking down the nature of her experiences. Lauren Busey, who works primarily in bronze sculpture, uses fragments of internal and external body imagery to capture the
intangible physical and emotional presence of important people in her life. Photographer Emily Glass similarly attempts to capture the inner being of her portrait subjects, while also employing unusual
compositions and framing to question the materiality of the world around her and position her own sense of isolation from it.
The show’s title “what distance back to truth” – taken from William Faulkner’s short story "The Bear" – suggests the act of retreat or regression from adult society in which several of the senior art majors are engaged as they search for something more authentic. Marion Mozley’s photographic series “Reaction and
Escape” documents the materialism of modern life and offers an escape from it through imagery evoking quiet and stillness. Joe Pero, in his new series “Peach Fuzz,” attempts to regress his artistic exploration back to the beginning by imitating children’s drawings, again reiterating the theme of breaking down the known to get to the true and the genuine.
The concerns of this group of young artists bring to mind the oft-repeated phrase on Sewanee’s campus: “How, then, shall we live?” Faced with the realities of moving on to the next phase of their lives and their artistic careers, this is the very question that Sewanee’s senior art majors in the Class of 2008 attempt to
answer.
