November 3 – 7
Artists: Sculpture Graduates Indigo Conat-Naar, Chelsea Southard, & Christian Ulloa, Advanced Sculpture Students, & Faculty & Staff
Reception: Thursday, November 5, 4-6pm
Location: Gallery 7, Humanities Building, 455 N Park St, Madison, WI
Addressing a broad spectrum of professional practice and possibilities from objects to projects including public art through a balance between diverse and inclusive concepts, context, and processes, the sculpture area students are encouraged to develop their voices as artists working within today’s society.
Interdisciplinary artist Indigo Conat-Naar’s work highlights the fleeting intersections of being, memory, and place that arise from encountering objects in the world. Her work ranges across installation, sculpture, video, sound, performance, drawing, text, and photography. Throughout these mediums, she maintains a clear voice of vulnerability and presence, opening up worlds of possibility outside of time. Within these worlds, her work becomes a language that theory can’t refute; a manifestation of the tender specifics of being. Beginning with rigorous observation and reflection with autobiographical fragments as building blocks, she creates new worlds with soft edges, attending to a single point of tension until it fills the room. Replicated, altered, and broken objects become the sculptural bodies that inhabit these worlds; characters entangled with their being and sustained only by a sympathetic viewer.
Chelsea Southard constructs experiences, objects, and architecture which navigate the enduring and the ephemeral, existing as a tool to strengthen awareness, widen the dimensions of perception, and play with the building blocks of form that make up our world. Through an alchemy of mixed metals and glass combined with the spectrums of sound and light, she creates works both large and small which interpret properties of the human experience and its underlying structures, unveiling the music that arises from living and to translate those vibrations into compositions of space and time. Her practice is an orchestration of elements furthering one’s ability to understand these frequencies and to give courage to those willing enough to play them. Each an instrument of the finest design, strung with strings tuned to the precise oscillation of our infinity, she sets the stage for each of us to master the greatest instrument of all, ourselves.
Christian Ulloa is a contemporary artist who works primarily through sculpture and uses humor and pop culture references to explore themes such as cultural spectacle and performative human nature as influenced by contemporary masculine culture. Centered on a use and analysis of ‘kayfabe’, which originates from the long-standing tradition in professional wrestling refering to the tacit agreement between professional wrestlers and their fans to pretend that overtly staged wrestling events, stories, and the characters presented are genuine, Ulloa creates meticulously crafted sculptures that employ trompe-l’oeil techniques. Produced through a process of mold-making, casting, and meticulous painting, the hyper-realistic sculptures act as performative representations, posing as the objects they are not while retaining evidence of their handmade fabrication. Exposing this ploy of kayfabe in society, the optical-illusion of the work brings awareness to the suspension of disbelief that occurs regarding the performative tendencies that humans display daily and our innate desire to find authenticity within the inauthentic. The work operates under the assumption that there is no complete deception in their depiction, but rather an audience willing to play along, encouraging the viewer to reflect on their role in the spectacle and consider whether a moral judgment on authenticity is even necessary.