April 7 – 13
Reception: Friday, April 11, 5-7pm
Location: Gallery 7, Humanities Building, 455 N Park St, Madison, WI
As someone who grew up dyslexic, my personal experiences with intelligence—both how it is defined and how it is valued in society—profoundly inform my work. Dyslexia is a neurological condition that affects brain development, influencing the way information is processed. While it impacts individuals in various ways, what I find interesting is the tendency for dyslexics to have a natural aptitude for spatial and haptic understanding. They learn and think with their hands. Play, the act of physically engaging with the material world, has always been my primary mode of making sense of life around me. This ability to think and learn through the hand is shared by many “non-neurotypical” individuals, yet it is undervalued in environments and systems that prioritize verbal intelligence. I’ve witnessed firsthand how individuals whose strengths lie outside the realm of linguistic thinking are overlooked and pushed toward paths that limit their potential, leading to careers that are undervalued.
Expressed through furniture, sculpture, prints, and paintings, my current body of work, Play Play Serious Play, critically examines how early childhood education, intelligence types, and societal beliefs about human capacity shape the life paths set for children based on their perceived aptitudes. I draw a connection between how the value found in our material culture of mass-consumption, ultimately trickles down to the way we measure the value of individuals based on their economic contributions. These themes intersect with broader cultural assumptions about who gets access to education and the tools necessary to shape their own futures.
What I’ve come to understand is that these very aptitudes, labeled as “weaknesses” in the classroom, are the same ones that make me an exceptional maker, and that the same aptitudes that led me to play with building toys as a child, have evolved into the skills I now use to forge my career. This physical interaction with the world is, for me, at the heart of play. Following this line of inquiry, the work has become about play, not as a trivial or secondary activity, but as a serious way of understanding and engaging with the world.
The UW-Madison Art MFA Qualifier Exhibition season continues with Matthew Bruhn’s exhibit. The qualifier solo exhibitions are presented by the graduate students during their fourth semester as the evaluation review of their creative work to qualify for advancement in the MFA program. Come view the work and research by our newest cohort of developing artists!