“Disrupted”

Water Valley Artist Society

Mixed Media Art Exhibition

Wildcat Gallery, Water Valley Administration Building

2021

Artist Statement

Our group exhibition, “Disrupted” is a commentary containing visual personal responses to our disrupted lives due to personal, metaphysical, virtual, geopolitical, and cultural interruptions that consistently invade or hinder. This exhibition contains fragmented intrinsic personal responses to varied disruptions as we studied and applied elements of art historical connections through the lens of the Dada Art Movement. Through the study of World War I, during the time of the Dada movement, artists engaged and reflected on their own narratives and reflections as a way to consider the deconstruction of self and the resulting reconstructed result.  In a way, we are considering our personal “warfare” as spiritual, physical, and psychological personal narratives. These “wars” are disruptions caused both by virtual and physical entities of disruption.    

Our exhibition also contains a series of chairs which have been repurposed as abstract sculptures formed through separation of human relationship. This void, created within the combines, were the direct results of absence. By repurposing broken chairs into art forms, while researching abstract sculptors, their content and their processes for making work, we were allowed to consider form and the essence of form as content. For us, the chairs stand in for the elements of presence in a time where the term “virtual” had created a sense of alienation and separation from the relational aspects of life. Our artists used fragmented found objects to create new forms to inhabit the chair space as a way to create a new “virtual” form.

The overarching purpose for this exhibition is to allow the study and elements of art history, with their processes, and to apply similar aspects in order to develop a visual conversation concerning current events and issues our artists are currently facing. Our hope is that viewers will be able to have their own conversations and to possibly empathize with the conversations of the artists and their work.