McGrath Gallery Schedule
The gallery is located on Bellarmine Boulevard off Norris Place, near the intersection of Norris Place and Princeton Drive in Louisville. All McGrath Gallery events are free and open to the public. Hours are 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. daily when the Bellarmine campus is open.
Spring 2013 Student Exhibit Schedule
A Hidden Wholeness:
The Zen Photography of Thomas Merton
An Exhibit of 35 Photographs by Thomas Merton
McGrath Art Gallery, Bellarmine University
May 7th - June 2nd, 2013
Open Daily
Thomas Merton is best known today for his spiritual writings on contemplation and his own personal spiritual journey that led him to study Eastern religions, especially Zen Buddhism.
Merton was also a visual artist of considerable talent exploring drawing and calligraphy and, as reflected in this exhibition, photography.
It is unclear exactly when Merton took up the camera. On October 10, 1961, Merton recorded in his journal his impressions of using a camera:
A completely miraculous achievement of forms. Marvelous, silent, vast spaces around the old buildings. Cold, pure light, and some grand trees … How the blankside of a frame house can be so completely beautiful I cannot imagine.
This very beginning of using the camera to isolate images, small things normally gone unnoticed, carried on through the brief history of Merton’s practice of photography and parallels Zen teaching in allowing the mind to embrace the unnoticed beauty in the world of mundane objects and the passing of light, shadow and textures through the course of a day. Deba P. Patnaik's writes:
In photography, he felt free, open and quiet – nothing to debate or discourse, nothing to argue or explain; only animated by imagination, silence, and connectedness with what he visually experienced. It served him as a mode of attuning "to the other music that is beyond the words."
Merton's photographs express the Zen perception of our immediate world as ever changing, impermanent, but with a unity of all things.
We are what we are. We are light and dark, substance and shadow, speak the images. We are matter and memory. We are pictures; we are mirrors. We are full; we are empty.
Remember the three Doors:
the door without wish
the door without sign
the door of emptiness.
SEE
And say: Amen. Say: Shantih.
Matthew Poppe and Kaitlin Ritcher
January 18 through February 10
Opening Reception Friday, January 18 5:00–7:00 p.m.
Allison Marcum, Donna Mullins and Kohdy Woods
February 15 through March 10
Opening Reception Friday, February 15 5:00–7:00 p.m.
Laurel Anderson, Jennifer Greb and Tatiana Rathke
March 15 through April 7
Opening Reception Friday, March 15 5:00–7:00 p.m.
Annual Bellarmine Student Exhibit
April 11 through April 28
Opening Reception Thursday, April 11 5:00–7:00 p.m.
Awards Ceremony at 6:00 p.m.
Bob Lockhart:
The Perimeters of Love are Surrounded by Thorns and Dogs
McGrath Gallery, Bellarmine University, December 14 through January 13
Artist’s Lecture: 5:30 p.m. Friday, January 11 in Pasteur Hall room 180
Reception for the Artist: 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. Friday, January 11th in the McGrath Gallery
Award-winning sculptor Bob Lockhart has recently completed a forty-year career as a professor of art at Bellarmine University. His distinctive bronze sculptures adorn the University’s campus, and his work has been displayed in galleries, museums, schools, churches and private collections around the country. He holds a BFA and MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago, and has been featured in over one hundred solo exhibits, as well as 75 group shows. Bob’s work is as enigmatic as it is intricate, combining human and bestial forms of abstracted proportions and in vibrant color. Equally engaging are the titles of his drawings – complex, absurd phrases that invite speculation and contemplation. This exhibit was planned and installed by the students in Bellarmine’s ART.410 class.
Please contact Laura Hartford for additional information: lhartford@bellarmine.edu
Tiffany Carbonneau
Opening reception: Friday, November 9, 5:00 to 7:00 p.m. The exhibit runs from November 9 to December 9.
Vessel, a solo exhibition by Bellarmine University Assistant Professor of Art, Tiffany Carbonneau, will be the culmination of her research as a 2011 Efroymson Contemporary Arts Fellow. For the previous three years, Tiffany has been collecting photographic and video documentation of international industrial waterways, including the Hudson River at the New York City Container Terminal, The Ohio River in Louisville, Kentucky, the Yangtze River as well as several other industrial waterways throughout China, the Chao Phraya River in Bangkok, Thailand, the Vistula River in Warsaw, Poland, and others. Tiffany maps the projection of these videos to highlight architectural elements unique to the space of exhibition. The juxtaposition of imagery allows for viewers to form connections between themselves and the communities that surround the movement of commodity, local and global, while the non-traditional presentation of video calls into question our receipt of information in the post digital age, allowing the viewer to re-examine their personal networks as well as their relationship with the information that is being presented.
Photography Invitational
Opening reception: Friday, October 5, 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. The exhibit runs from October 5 to November 4, featuring work by Annie Langan (top photo), Rosemary Jesionowski (bottom photo) and Sharon Lee Hart (below).
Following a lecture by Rosemary Jesionowski in Pasteur Hall room 180 at 5:00
Bellarmine University is proud to announce its third Photography Invitational, opening in the McGrath Gallery on October 5th and featuring the work of local and regional artists: Sharon Lee Hart, Rosemary Jesionowski,and Annie Langan.
The Bellarmine Photography Invitational brings together diverse talents from throughout the region working in photography and photo-derived media. All events are free and open to the public.
Sharon Lee Hart was born in Washington, D.C., earned her MFA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and recently relocated to Lexington to teach photography at the University of Kentucky. She will be exhibiting work from her series “Sanctuary: Portraits of Rescued Farm Animals”. Inspired by her belief that individual animals each have unique, complex emotional lives, she creates portraits of those rescued from slaughterhouses, live meat markets, laboratories, cockfighting and other unspeakable horrors. Hart's first monograph, "Sanctuary: Portraits of Rescued Farm Animals" published by Charta, will be available in bookstores this fall.
How does place define and change us? This question is explored by Virginia artist Rosemary Jesionowski. Born in Portland, Oregon, Jesionowski received her MFA from Indiana University. She has exhibited throughout the country and currently resides in Richmond where she teaches a variety of courses as Assistant Professor of Multiple Imaging at the University of Mary Washington. She will be exhibiting work from her series Mapping Nowhere, which incorporates map imagery as well as satellite photography. These images reference her experience of place and her investigation of the relationship between location and identity.
Louisville artist Annie Langan received her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and currently teaches Photography and Multimedia at the Kentucky School of Art. Her work has been shown in numerous national and international exhibits and is included in private and public collections including those of Sir Elton John and the Museum of Art at RISD. Her multi-frame panoramic images are about human relationships and their co-existence with the landscape.
Emily Sheehan
Opening reception: Friday, August 31, 5:00 to 7:00 p.m. Exhibit runs from August 31 to September 23.
Emily Sheehan received her M.F.A in Visual Studies, with a specialization in Drawing and Sculpture from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2008. Her artistic research/practice utilizes perceptual drawing (drawing from observation in a multi-sensory way) to explore the way marks left on a page become evidence of lived experience. Sheehan uses both traditional and nontraditional drawing materials and techniques to create works that compel the artist and the viewer to linger in the human space between encounter and retelling; it is where we make our world personal. Her work has been exhibited nationally in group, invitational and juried shows and is included in the private collection of the president of the College of Saint Benedict as well as the collections of The Weismann Art Museum and the Target Corporation.
“We perceive through our bodily senses, absorb and evaluate each encounter, and construct means to interpret, respond to and convey our understanding to others. It is in this human space between encounter and communication that we make our world personal. The activity of perceptual drawing (drawing, immediately, from observation in a multi-sensory way) holds me in that human space longer. It makes me think about what I internalize. It lets me decide what to share and then allows me to create drawings whose physicality and tactile nature entice others to encounter my experience and embrace their own.” ~ Emily Sheehan