BU gallery hosts art-teachers-only show

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For the first time, a group of Brandon University faculty members will be featured in an art-teachers-only show at the Glen P. Sutherland Gallery of Art, starting on Thursday, Jan. 18.

Four faculty members who teach at the IshKaabatens Waasa Gaa Inaabateg Department of Visual Art at BU are artists themselves and will display their work in a show titled “Nostalgiacore.”

“Nostalgiacore” will be a contemporary exhibition featuring new work by professors Lisa Wood, Kevin McKenzie, Lin Xu and Kevin Eichi deForest. The opening will be celebrated with an event on Thursday at 5 p.m.

Stacey Koosel, an assistant professor at BU who specializes in art history and Indigenous art, said she is also a curator and when she started at BU this past September, it seemed to make sense to put her college’s work together in her first show.

“All the professors from the visual art department are all artists and art is their research. For me, curating is a form of research, it’s a way for me to learn more about what’s happening in the art world,” Koosel said. “So as well as teaching students about art, they’re also all their own creative practices. They’re all doing exhibitions, particularly Kevin McKenzie. He has exhibitions across North America. But they all have active practices as artists, and they’re all constantly making art and exhibiting.”

Koosel said much of the artists’ work links through nostalgia and remembering past events. Lin Xu is featuring a “pillow” series.

“It looks like a soft pillow, but it’s actually a ceramic. There’s a whole series of them spread across the gallery — about a dozen. Each one has a little tiny sort of human figure, and the figure is emerging from a crack in the pillow. I think the artist’s comment was, after the pandemic people are beginning to emerge from their hiding places. From the safe spaces that we’ve tucked away from in the world,” Koosel said.

“We all feel like we’re sort of coming back to having public events again and having more of an outgoing community after the pandemic. But Lin, being an introvert, said she saw it as some sort of peeking and then going back inside, going back inside the pillow.”

For deForest, it was about remembering his long conversations in his head while walking his dog.

“They’re about his meditative walks with his dog, Hannah. And so, while the artist is walking his dog, he’s thinking and he started recording what thoughts are going through his mind, what emotions he was feeling, maybe what the dog was sensing, what she was smelling or seeing,” Koosel said.

“All the works have to do with nostalgia. That is the way I sort of conceptually put them together.”

Wood took inspiration from meetings she had with other female artists on how they balanced work and family, Koosel said.

“Lisa’s work was her documenting meetings that she had with other artists who happen to be women, about how they balanced their work, their life, and their career. Documentation in three different ways. There are photographs of the meals she had with these women, then she has drawings and paintings sort of documenting these conversations. And then she has a recording as well. So, when you go into the space where her installation is, you’ll hear the conversation that she was having with these women, the photographs and documentation.”

McKenzie focused on comic books he read in his childhood to craft his indigenous series.

“Kevin McKenzie has an Indigenous series, with comic book icon Conan the Barbarian. When he looked at this comic book figure, he looked at him like an Indigenous role model. And looking back to his youth, and the influence that this comic book had on him, and the captions are changed to have more sort of Indigenous messages and content,” Koosel said.

“Nostalgiacore” will be on at the BU art gallery from Jan. 18 to Feb. 17. The gallery will be open for viewing Thursday to Saturday from 1 to 4 p.m.

» khenderson@brandonsun.com