SHAUN BANGERT: Three Years Later. . .    

August 24 – September 19,
Reception & Welcome Back Party: September 10, 4 - 6 p.m.

Bangert’s photographic and installation work explores questions of identity, time, space, and how one moves forward after experiencing trauma—both personal and universal—through the lens of the environment that surrounds her.

The work evolves around two main series. One centers on straight photography of her family and immediate environment, quietly marking the passage of time. The other offers a glimpse into the journals, lyrics, and poems written during the same period, offering a parallel narrative to the photographs.

Shaun Bangert is an avid traveler, photographer, filmmaker, graphic designer, installation, and mixed media artist who has exhibited her work both nationally and abroad. Bangert has worked at SVSU since 2000, and has a BFA from Siena Heights University, and an MFA from the University of Michigan. She teaches courses in graphic design and photography for both the undergraduate and graduate programs at Saginaw Valley State University.

KRISTY DEETZ: Rabbit Weaving; Complex Threads of Making, (an exhibition of Industrial Jacquard Weavings)

September 28 – October 22,
Closing Reception: October 22, 4 - 6 p.m., Lecture: October 22

Rabbit Weaving: Complex Threads of Making is an interdisciplinary traveling exhibition featuring industrial jacquard weavings based on Kristy Deetz’ Through the Veil and Holidays Unfolding painting series. The show includes two books by Edward S. Louis that are based on the artwork: The Singular Adventures of Rabbit and Kitty Boy and Holidays Unfolding: The Continuing Adventures of Rabbit and Kitty Boy. The artwork depicts illusionistic fabric (as drapery) that acts as a threshold to place shape-shifting Rabbit and its sidekick, Kitty Boy, into multiple, often conflicting, layers of space and meaning. The images good-humoredly deconstruct imagery from pop, outsider, and high culture. Dark humor, visual puns, symbols and metaphors, moments of silence, art historical allusions, cultural collisions, and spiritual conundrums also play with style and formal construction.

Kristy Deetz is Professor Emerita, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. Her extensive exhibition record includes national and international venues. As curator, Kristy has organized exhibitions that have traveled to art museums, university art galleries, and art centers. She is frequently a visiting artist and has led numerous painting/drawing workshops at venues including Haystack, Oxbow, Penland, Anderson Ranch, and Arrowmont.

MILLE GULDBECK: Alienation and Desire; A Lexicon of Looking

November 2 – November 19,
Closing Reception: November 19, 4 - 6 p.m., Lecture: November 19, 3 p.m.

Guldbeck’s work explores through observation and contemplation the dichotomies of the experience of nature for the artist as maker opposed to the perceptions of nature by the viewer. An avid amateur naturalist and trained as an anthropologist prior to working in the arts, she utilizes a wide variety of materials and experimentation in her work. Her practice addresses our relationship to time, scale, and ecology through process-based interactions with sites and materials. Her work engages with the intersections of the event, failure, painting, misinterpretation, awe, and repair. The practice of painting can comment on our problematic relationship with nature. Our experience of nature is more often through secondary sources; very little experience comes from direct observation. Most of what we learn about the natural world is mediated by institutions, television, and digital cameras. This serves to extend a sense of alienation from nature as an otherworldly place outside of human experience.

Mille Guldbeck is an interdisciplinary artist who grew up between the US and Denmark and currently resides in Ohio. She earned an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa and holds bachelor’s degrees from Columbia College in Chicago, Aarhus Universitet and The Jyske Kunstakademi in Denmark

FALL BFA EXHIBITION

November 30 – December 12, Reception: December 10, 4 – 6 p.m.

This exhibition features artwork by the Bachelor of Fine Arts candidates and serves as a completion of their undergraduate program. Students are responsible for all aspects of the exhibition process. Exhibiting students include candidates in the disciplines of graphic design, ceramics and painting.

22^ND ANNUAL JURIED ART STUDENT EXHIBITION

January 11 – February 5, Reception and Awards: January 14, 4 – 6 p.m.

This exhibition will include the work of SVSU art students from all levels created during the past year and will include multiple disciplines taught within the art curriculum including graphic design, photography, video, painting, watercolor, drawing, ceramics, sculpture and three-dimensional design. Exceptional work is recognized in an awards presentation during the reception.

HIGH SCHOOL ART TEACHERS: Our Turn

February 15 – March 13, Reception: February 25, 4 – 6 p.m.

For some, the creative process starts at a very young age but doesn't come into fruition until the high school years literally. The Art watercolor at Saginaw Valley State University strongly supports this stage of creative development by high school students. But instead of the kids getting all the accolades, this time we’re flipping the script and recognizing the outstanding talent that has been guiding these young minds without recognition. This exhibition honors and celebrates the creative work being done by high school teachers. The work in this exhibition consists of a variety of different mediums including digital design, photography, painting, ceramics, and drawings from local and regional high school teachers. Some of the exhibiting teachers are from Bay City Central, Bay City All Saints, Carrolton, Freeland, Hemlock, Heritage, H. H. Dow, Midland, Merrill, North Branch, and St. Charles High schools.

SHANNA MEROLA: Love Canal Series

March 22 – April 9, Reception: April 8, 4 – 6 p.m., Lecture: April 8, 3:00 p.m.

“Love Canal” examines North America’s first Superfund site through the unsung history of women who organized for environmental justice in their neighborhoods. Nestled just outside of Niagara Falls, this sleepy town in upstate NY became headline news in 1979 when the entire community was unknowingly poisoned by leaking dioxin containers buried just below the asphalt. By 1980 the mothers of Love Canal were reporting extremely high rates of birth defects, miscarriages, and childhood leukemia. Merola creates stunning sculptural collages using analogue and digital imaging methods, combining personal documentation of crumbling infrastructure, ecosystems, and plant life, with stock images from wholesale medical websites which are printed, hand-cut, manipulated with light, and assembled then rephotographed and printed digitally. The beauty of the images serves as a dichotomy to the lived horror.

Shanna Merola is an artist, photojournalist, and legal worker. Her sculptural photocollages are informed by the stories of environmental justice struggles past and present. Merola has been awarded residencies and fellowships through MacDowell, the Studios at MASS MoCA, Banff Centre for Arts + Creativity, Kala Institute of Art, the Kresge Arts Foundation, Society for Photographic Education, Bulk Space, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Art. She has shown her work in exhibitions both nationally and abroad – from the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit to the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art in South Korea.

WINTER BFA EXHIBITION

April 9 – May 1, Reception: April 22, 4 – 6 p.m.

This exhibition features artwork by the Bachelor of Fine Arts candidates and serves as a completion of their undergraduate program. Students are responsible for all aspects of the exhibition process. Exhibiting students include candidates in the disciplines of ceramics and painting

JAPANESE WOODBLOCK COLLECTION: Images from Edo and Meiji Periods

May 10 – August 13

This exhibit is a collection of Japanese woodblock prints of the Edo and Meiji periods donated by Dr. Louis W. Doll, to the University Art Gallery. 

The woodblock print became a major medium of artistic expression in Japan during the Edo period (1603-1867).  This was an age of unprecedented peace which saw the growth of a prosperous class of merchants and craftsmen.  Unable to acquire significant political or social prestige within the rigid feudal system, this new merchant class devoted itself to the enjoyment of the present.  It helped create an urban society which thrived on entertainment and extravagance.  Woodblock prints produced in large editions supplied this new middle class with images that would record the pleasures and beauty of life in the Tokugawa capital city of Edo.

The Meiji era (1868-1912), a period of rapid modernization in Japan, saw a great change in both subjects and style of woodblock prints.  Artists incorporated Western techniques of chiaroscuro and linear perspective.  Japanese in Western dress, military and political events as well as scenes containing carriages and railroads became common imagery.  With the introduction of aniline dyes intensely bright red, green and purple replaced the more subtle natural pigments.  Although the Meiji period has been considered a time of decline for woodblock prints, many interesting editions were produced combining elements of both Japanese and Western art. 

All exhibits and receptions are free and open to the public.  For more information on exhibits and gallery open hours visit our webpage at www.svsu.edu/artgallery or call (989) 964-2291.  The University Art Gallery is in the Arbury Fine Arts Center on the campus of SVSU.  For more information www.svsu.edu/visit/campusmaps/