Surviving in Interesting Times

A bathhouse. A garden of books. A portal to different
dimension. These were just a few of the exhibits that appeared in the “May You
Survive in Interesting Times” art exhibition, which served as an exploration of
modern society from the perspectives of various artists.

The gallery featured a total of 10 exhibits and ran from
Sept. 20 to Oct. 19 at the Synergy Park North gallery. Greg Metz, UTD clinical
associate professor and curator of the exhibit, said that the theme was
inspired by a Chinese proverbial curse, “May you live in interesting times.”

“When someone tells you that, you’re in trouble because
interesting times are coming ahead and we don’t like anything that we don’t
understand, or that we’re not used to or that is represents change,” Metz said.
“It was also used, in a lot of ways, to — in a spirited way — inflame a
coalition: to meet some challenge that is, in many cases, fabricated.”

The idea of survival, he said, was incorporated to explore
how artists deal with modern times, and how they express their own creative
survival mechanisms.

“They may be political, they may just be humorous, but
usually they have something to do with their personal situations and their
identities,” Metz said. “(The exhibition was) really developed around fake news
and alternative facts and the way that they’re being used today by the media to
create crisis that can coalesce like a kind of unionized opposition.”

These mechanisms took a variety of forms in the different
exhibits. One was “Public Bathhouse,” by Ashling (Chunyu) Han, depicting the
nakedness and erasure of class lines that occurred in Chinese bathhouses.
Another was “Books, Borders and Boundaries,” a collaboration between artists VET
and Sheila Cunningham, featuring the way pages from books can be recycled and
re-invented into complex shapes and designs. Still another was “Suburbia
Stargate,” by Ryder Richards: a large, portal-shaped structure of plywood,
wires and AstroTurf — replete with functioning sprinkler system. 

“It took me about a week to construct it,” Richards said.
“Then I put some Pine-Sol inside the sprinklers so that when people would step
on a pressure-sensitive mat, the sprinklers would pop out, and would mist them
with the scent of Pine-Sol, like a disinfectant.”

The piece represented a sci-fi portal into a suburban
“pocket universe.” Richards said that making interactive pieces — like
“Suburbia Stargate” — can be tricky to do in an art gallery, where viewers are
taught not to touch the art. That in itself, said Richards, was a commentary on
the sets of rules in the art world; how, in many ways, the environment of an
art gallery is a false construct, like the stereotype of suburbia.

“To get people to break out of that construct is one of the
purposes for “Suburbia Stargate”: to start talking about the idea that we’re
possibly living in a utopia right now, instead of living in one of the worst
times ever,” Richards said. “The fact that I can live in the suburbs and not think
about anything but my lawn—I think that’s an amazing time period to live in.
Yet, we choose to engage ourselves in all this political turmoil.”

The 6,000 square feet of the SP/N gallery allowed some
artists like Richards to occupy large amounts of space with their works.
Another such artist was Josephine Durkin, an associate professor of art at
Texas A&M, whose wall drawing “Lost in Translation” took up three walls in
one room of the gallery.

“There’s a repeated form in this work. In earlier works,
I’ve made these things that look like flowers,” Durkin said. “But in this
instance, it was new. These do have a kind of similar shape, but because of the
color palette and because of what these were stemming from, I really wanted
them to take on that look of a storm.”

“Lost in Translation,” Durkin said, is representative of
something, that, in itself, is hard to articulate: the psychological impact of
experiencing certain events alone, and the difficulty of translating that
experience to others.

“I really enjoyed making this work because it was like the
up-and-down of going up and down the ladders and looking and so forth,” Durkin
said. “I think that kind of activity, that physical exertion of making the work
— especially in a short amount of time — I think that mirrors the kind of
exhaustion that can take place from trying to communicate something that’s
impossible to communicate.”

The exhibition incorporated works from alumni, as well as
distinguished and emerging artists. Metz said he sought to create a balance
between the two.

“I also wanted to use artists that were performing with
different materials and mediums, and I also wanted to have artists who had
diverse methodologies for how they approach their work,” Metz said. “So, we had
a good presentation of very different approaches to this idea of ‘survival in
interesting times.’ And interesting times are what you make them, you know?”