The College’s faculty art exhibition, an opportunity for the Saint Mary’s art department faculty to display their work and research, has returned to campus as it does every four years.
The exhibition will have a wide variety of art concentrations represented. Fibers will be presented by professor and department chair Julie Tourtillotte, sculpture by assistant professor of art Krista Hoefle, photography by art professor Douglas Tyler, ceramics by associate professor of art Sandi Ginter and painting and print media by assistant art professor and gallery director Ian Weaver.
“The faculty exhibition provides a wonderful opportunity for the art faculty to share our artwork,” Tourtillotte said in an email. “The exhibition is a good survey of the range of media and ideas that our faculty explore in our professional art practices.”
Tourtillotte will be presenting works of screen-printed and hand-cut textiles.
Weaver, who has participated in two faculty art exhibitions since he took over as gallery director in 2015, will be displaying a large-scale, mixed-media drawing with ink, prints and collage.
“I am looking forward to having as many people as possible experience the exhibition and to engage in a conversation with the work of the faculty,” Weaver said in an email. “I would like people to see the multivalent practice of our talented faculty and to sit with the work and think about how works of art can affect our lives and our minds.”
The exhibition opened Thursday and is on display from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday in the Moreau Art Galleries. The exhibit can also be viewed on the weekend with an appointment until March 3.
“I am also hopeful that people from other departments and offices on campus will come and learn about what constitutes ‘research’ in the art world,” Weaver said. “Often times, people think artists simply wait for inspiration, and in a mad dash make work. That is not the case: The faculty in this exhibition are serious-minded researchers who produce works that are not only technically proficient, but also that touch on a variety of thematic areas represented across the College, including but not limited to science, technology, the environment, memory, family and many other areas.”
Weaver said the exhibition is “more than simply an opportunity to show work; it is an opportunity to be in a conversation with my peers in the gallery space. We rarely get to see what one another is working on in their studios, so this provides an opportunity to do that.”
Tyler, who is presenting digital photographic prints, said in an email that the exhibition is “an opportunity to let [his] students and the SMC community get some idea of what areas [his] personal research is taking [him] to.”
This year’s faculty art exhibition is especially memorable to Tyler as his work for this exhibition is a special collaborative photographic art project with his daughter Hayley.
“Creating this body of work with my daughter gave the entire process a special meaning, and I believe that it brought my daughter and I closer together,” Tyler said. “... I believe the exhibition displays the diversity of interests and techniques that currently exists for the art faculty at Saint Mary’s. Though our faculty is relatively small compared to larger universities, there is a multiplicity of media presented with varied and very contemporary approaches to those media.”
