The Department of Visual Art & Design hosted the opening reception of the Biennial Faculty Exhibition on Sept. 14 from 7-9 p.m. in the Mary Elizabeth Dee Shaw Gallery.
Addison James, Weber State University art student, appreciated seeing the work of her professors. “It helps me reflect on what they’re teaching in their classes,” James said. She enjoyed Department Chair Mathew Choberka’s work espacially.
“The painting had great detail and what (Choberka) calls ‘moments,'” James said. “Whenever he critiques someone’s work, he’ll say, ‘I really love this moment.’ I kept thinking of that while looking at his work.”
Maddie Hibbert, WSU graphic design student, is starting her third year working at the Shaw Gallery and loves the faculty exhibitions.
“You always get a lot of variety of work because everyone is from a different medium,” Hibbert said. “In other shows, it’s usually just one theme. These are funner because you don’t know what you’re going to get.”
The exhibition features the work of painters, graphic designers, sculptors and photographers.
“Students will see a lot of different ideas represented here, but they’ll also get to see in a real material form all the great things these faculty are doing,” said Paul Crow, associate professor of photography, whose work is featured along with more than 30 of his colleagues in the department.
Crow was inspired by the works of Nicholaus Copernicus, the father of heliocentrism, which was a controversial idea at the time.
“My piece is sort of a picture about uncertainty and the stories we tell ourselves and each other about how solid and stable things are,” Crow said. “The truth is, we are always in this environment of instability. Right now, we are sitting on this planet that is spinning at about 700 miles per hour, but it feels stable.”
Crow went on to talk about how he captured his vision.
“I made the piece by taking a picture right at sunset and calculating the length that the exposure would have to be to give me the exposure that I wanted,” Crow said. “I knew in degrees approximately how far the Earth should be moving per minute, so I just moved the camera at that speed to give the illusion that the landscape was actually moving at that speed while the viewer is still.”
Another artist whose work is featured is Department of Visual Art and Design Outreach Manager Todd Oberndorfer, a graduate of Weber State University. He has been working in the industry for nearly 20 years.
Oberndorfer has two pieces featured in the exhibition, one of which was completed right around legislation time.
“At the capitol building, it says ‘Vox populi,’ or ‘Voice of the people’ in Latin,” Oberndorfer said. “When I see it, voice of the people represents a majority of the people but not necessarily all the people.”
His other piece was inspired from his time living in Morocco where he became interested in textiles and the storytelling involved in tapestry and rug making.
Oberndorfer views himself as an activist artist and focuses much of his work on church/state issues and population growth.
The exhibition is free and open to the public. It opened on Sept. 14 and will continue until Nov. 10.
