Installation view of the 2024 Biennial Faculty Exhibition in Weber’s Mary Elizabeth Dee Shaw Galley, including JP Orquiz’s “The lives in the Palestinian Genocide physically represented for those fortunate enough not to be there” in the foreground.

Throughout history, artists in every medium have crafted monuments to those killed in wars, but the 20th century challenged not only their adequacy, but their right to do so. The critic most often cited, Theodore Adorno, summing up all art as poetry, wrote that after Auschwitz, there can be no poetry. Consider, then, the challenge that Weber State Sculpture Lab Technician JP Orquiz undertook when he chose to call attention to the worst violence—so far—in the 21st century: the wholesale slaughter of Palestinians by the American-backed, Israeli army.

“The lives in the Palestinian Genocide physically represented for those fortunate enough not to be there” is not a work of art that sits comfortably with 25 preceding centuries of art intended to produce an aesthetic response alone. As angry as its title, and as confrontational towards the viewer, this 3-D printed poster, laid on its back in the middle of the gallery like another victim, strives to do nothing less than give its audience a sense of just how many is 30,000 dead. This obscenity is impossible to talk about rationally, and so I won’t attempt it, except to say the work is a calm volcano that waits to erupt when, contrary to William Wordsworth, one attempts to recollect it in tranquility … and fails.

Faculty exhibitions share many structural resemblances to everyday art shows, but are distinct on another level. There’s the obvious difference that the works are not primarily for sale. Work devoid of what Frank Zappa called “commercial potential” thrives in this environment, free of the need to elicit desire, though with the ironic impact of often being all the more covetable due to their candid self-expression and lack of a shared agenda.

Andrew Rice’s “Untitled” and “In Sullivan County,TX”

 

Katie Mesery, “Please Don’t Leave Me in Guilt”

Another way of approaching the difference might be to think of a wedding, where everyone is either a “member of the wedding” or a guest, but not both. The members, the artists in this case, are all professionals, fully identified with the arts. All will have critiqued other artists, served on juries, and are insiders in a way those who submit their work to a gallery may not be. Being well known quantities to each other, and well used to explaining their work in person, the faculty are better able to explain what they’re doing, but paradoxically less likely to feel the need.

At Weber, then, there are no elaborate statements. This is better for the viewer, who is allowed to respond with a freedom akin to that felt by the artist. But it can also be daunting for those accustomed to being spoon-fed an interpretation, which more and more is seen as the proper role of the curator: the newest member of the process, who might otherwise have conceived the show’s missing theme.

Here there’s also a likelihood of seeing more of where art comes from. William Emerich contributes classroom demonstrations that grow in size as more original content emerges. Katie Mesery’s digital drawings become “Please Don’t Leave Me in Guilt” as she plugs them back into the real, albeit cerebral world they emerge from: her own imagination. And Andrew Rice’s sixteen comic book collages display the recombinant nature of all human creations. What he saw, transformed, is what we get.

The university is often characterized as an Ivory Tower: a place of solitude and the intimate encounter with oneself. Sarah Serratos’ dance performance on video, “Godalupe,” is one of several such, each in a personally revealing, constructed environment, that her vulnerability and strength inhabit together. Jason Manley’s “Ocean” presents another place of solitude, the bathtub, which in his case trades the capacity to hold water for the penetrating power of poetic diction. In an almost annual series of mixed media works resembling children’s toys, titled with one of the oldest words in the English language, Ben Evjen seeks to “Allay”—alleviate or put to rest—anxieties aroused by challenges like epilepsy. And Paul Crow, in an almost motionless video of a stand of trees, creates an hallucinatory encounter, alone in an enormous space where genuine life genuinely whispers.

Ariel C. Wilson, “From Where”

 

Work by K Stevenson

It’s been said, and not without reason, that in order to do anything with mastery, it’s essential to teach it. For centuries, even the best artists—particularly they—studied with masters and were said to “stand on their shoulders.” And then again, on some level few who teach art can always make it on a strictly personal impulse. So the barriers to collaboration are lower, and while none of these 27 artists describes their work as such, neither do they make spurious claims to complete originality. Painter Matthew Choberka—as in “Look for What’s Looking”—has never sought to hide the evidence that he knows a good visual gesture when he sees one. The videos Ariel Wilson incorporates into “From Where the Sun is Setting”—which can be followed live on your own screen after leaving the gallery—have their roots in the great Romantic landscapes of the 19th century. Printmaker K Stevenson, as befits the international cooperation that printers have enjoyed for years now, may have introduced more imported ideas than anyone else in Utah. And even before she took over as gallery director, Lydia Gravis began showing her own work alongside that of colleagues mining similar veins.

Finally, and completely unexpected despite the many Pop influences on display, there are the statuettes of Camela Corcoran. Already a remarkably skilled sculptor of tiny, human figures that are fashioned from polymer clay in order to take part in an almost subliminal Comedy of Manners, she recently took a turn in the direction of something utterly new when she discovered the detritus that accumulates on the floor of a glassblowing studio. These inevitable fragments, often as intricate as the works they’re cut from, and often far more durable, have been sneaking into mainstream glass art for decades. Originally know as “Stale Dales,” after Dale Chihuly—surely the most prolific source of ornamental glass shards—they provided Corcoran with an original departure from the stigma associated with figurines and tchotchkes. With titles like “Fragile Consciousness” or “Cynical Clarity,” they appear to possess elaborate lives of their own.

Artists with faculty positions have always enjoyed advantages, which in the past may have discouraged them from a certain amount of hard work. Things have changed, of course, both in the job and in the real world all art celebrates. The 2024 Biennial Faculty Exhibition in Weber’s Mary Elizabeth Dee Shaw Gallery, seen from the door, hardly appears to be in there, but the show and the space unfold before the viewer’s eye to reveal some of the most impressive visual treats anywhere, including those delights omitted here as a reward for those who make the trip in person.

Four Figurines by Camela Corcoran

2024 Biennial Faculty Exhibition, Mary Elizabeth Dee Shaw Gallery, Weber State University, Ogden, through Nov. 16.

All images courtesy of the author.

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.