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June 2, 2016

Art, design — and a ‘coffin-cradle’ for storytelling: Graduate student work intrigues at annual Henry Art Gallery show

Artist Benjamin Gale-Schreck lies on his “coffin-cradle.” He invites people to lie down on it and experience the sounds and vibrations he creates. A lot of his work relates to experiences with family, he said, back in El Paso, Illinois, where his late father started an arts center.Peter Kelley

Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, for student sculpture and paintings from introspective to interactive with a sort of sideshow feel, intriguing photos and design pieces that seek to wrangle the world of data and assist in decision making.

It’s the annual exhibit of thesis work by 14 students graduating from the University of Washington School of Art + Art History + Design‘s Master of Fine Arts and Master of Design programs. The exhibit’s works of art and design are on display at the Henry Art Gallery through June 26.

Bryan Allen Robertson‘s “Look Out, Kid, They Keep it All Hid,” a painting comprising dozens of layers of vinyl and oil paint, uses a Bob Dylan song as inspiration and brings the sense of a county fair or similar Americana — a notion chillingly underscored by the presence of a large handgun. A second painting by Robertson titled “Johnny’s in the Basement Mixing Up the Medicine” continues the artist’s Dylan-inspired “Subterranean Homesick Blues” series.

On a nearby wall, Heather Nibert‘s painted moody urban scene, “Sky View,” reveals a drippingly dark night view from Seattle’s Columbia Center towers.

“It’s a coffin-cradle — sort of a storytelling device,” Benjamin Gale-Schreck said of the wooden structure before him, in which he invites participants to lie, listen and feel. Gale-Schreck held a small sheet of slate saved from a 19th century rail station.

“I kind of charge it – or conjure the system by sitting on this stump and rubbing the slate and calling people into the piece,” he said. He creates a soundscape by moving the microphone on the slate that is tuned to deep vibrations felt by the prone participant. As he does this he tells a calming story, as he would to one of his own two children.

“Look Out, Kid, They Keep it All Hid,” by Bryan Allen Robertson, part of his Subterranean Homesick Blues series, inspired by Bob Dylan.Peter Kelley

“A lot of my work is about taking things I learned from my father, to not just preserve it but bring it forward for my children,” Gale-Schreck said.

Paul Baughman‘s large wooden structure, appropriately titled “Balance,” looks a little like a massive teeter-totter. The piece involves the artist himself in performance, as he ferries his own weight in black clay from one side of the piece to the other. If he should fall — and that does happen, he said — the clay stays where it has landed.

Baughman says the piece reflects a sort of “deconstructing my own position in society.” With this piece, he said, he is attempting to “understand the role of the individual in relation specifically  to agency, and power, and change.”

Sculptor Anna Mlasowsky‘s “Borderlands” involves clear, vacuum-formed plastic molds of obsidian rocks, a video of the artist and accompanying poem to which viewers listen on headphones. “What is being expressed is kind of an idea of unification of oppositions through a process of change,” she said.

Photographer Sarah Skwira said her striking large-format photos are meditations on the everyday domestic world with the common theme of “aging and decay — something I am really drawn to.”

“Should I Share This?” a hypothetical mobile app by Jaewon Hwang, is a social media filter that would help users better control their postings.Peter Kelley

Now, having seen such innovations, should we express our feelings about them on social media? Jaewon Hwang‘s design piece “Should I Share This?” seeks to provide an answer. Hwang designed a hypothetical app she calls a social media filter that reviews your old posts to advise you whether the post you are about to share is appropriate. In her artist’s statement she wrote that the intent is to “give users more control without cluttering the sharing experience.”

Asked what prompted the idea, Hwang said, “My own mistake!” In years past, out of a wish to be nice, she friended people on social media. “Then a few years later I ended up with 500 friends, and most of them I’ve never met in person.”

Catherine Lim also used design to enhance and assist in her practical and real-world piece, “Engaging in Aging.” She spent a couple of months visiting a local senior center and encouraging ideas to help the problem of social isolation, which many such residents experience.

“The idea for this is based on the belief that everyone is creative and has something to offer,” Lim said. With seniors at the center, she created a set of intervention strategies to treat social isolation and helped the residents with a website to organize outings. Key to the success of the project was, as the title explains, engaging with the seniors and respecting their ideas.

“Engaging with Aging,” a design project by Catherine Lim. She worked with residents in a senior center to bring out their ideas on how to help social isolation, which residents of such facilities often feel.Peter Kelley

“I think the important thing is, if I went in and observed, did interviews and made assumptions, I probably would have come up with different things,” Lim said, adding that the participants were “very generous with their time and their perspectives.”

Geoff Gray studied principles of visual perception to create “Navigating 3d Scatter Plots in Immersive Virtual Reality,” which uses a virtual reality headset to help the viewer navigate and “see the overall structure” of data in a three-dimensional world. “It’s like a tool for exploration,” he said.

Other artists showing their work were Ben Dunn, Chad P. Hall, Joe Sparano, Erin Elizabeth Wilson and Ellen (Jing) Xu. All the student artists were encouraged to treat this show as a professional installation.

Greeting and talking with visitors at the press preview were Jamie Walker, director of the School of Art + Art History + Design; and Jes Gettler, the Henry’s exhibition designer and lead preparator.

“This is indicative of what we do,” said Walker to those gathered for the exhibit’s press preview. “We support artists and designers as individuals engaged in independent creative research.”

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For more information on the exhibition or Henry Art Gallery, contact Dana Van Nest, associate director of marketing, communications and public relations, at danavn@henryart.org or 206-616-9625.