Exhibition
October 19 – November 6, 2021
The Jacob Lawrence Gallery presents The Reordering of Things, a group exhibition showcasing works in a variety of media by nine MFA students from the University of Washington School of Art + Art History + Design. Developed over the summer of 2021 by students in the Painting + Drawing, 3D4M, and Photo/Media programs, the featured works seek to upend familiar narratives and the ways they shape us, remapping our relationships to each other and the world. The exhibition’s title references Michel Foucault’s 1966 book, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences.
Together the artists’ work questions ideas and identities engendered by notions of nationhood, anthropology, capitalism, and more, sometimes offering a personal mythos or an imagined landscape. For instance, Sadaf Sadri’s This Country Does Not Exist (2021) is a composite of various maps of countries, created using artificial intelligence, that speaks to the endless search by immigrants for a perfect country. Althea Fultz creates a constellation of surreal images that move seamlessly between dream and reality. Christina Valenzuela depicts scenes from the narratives of Catholic saints, problematizing them and the role they have played in the history of Western civilization.
The Jacob Lawrence Gallery is open Tuesday through Thursday from 10am to 5pm (with a 20-person limit), Fridays and Saturdays by appointment.
About the Artists
Aly Edmondson
Edmondson is an interdisciplinary artist originally from Lafayette, Indiana. She graduated from Ball State University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts emphasis in Photography and Intermedia. Her artwork is often a reflection or representation of identity — socioeconomically, socio-politically, and socio-physiologically. She documents past and present experiences, exploring concepts of those identities and the many ways they intersect. Edmondson’s inspiration stems from her and her family’s own experiences of social issues, and her work incorporates mediums such as photography, video, performance, ceramics, and installation. During the COVID-19 pandemic, production limits and restricted access to equipment and facilities have led Edmondson to explore using creative writing, poetry, and audio in her art practice.
Rowen Foster
Foster grew up in Houston and Austin, Texas. Foster studied sculpture and creative writing at the Kansas City Art Institute and has exhibited work in Texas, Missouri, Washington, and Bulgaria. In creating surreal hybrids and abject representations of bodies, Foster integrates research based in gender and disability studies, intersectional feminisms, and queer theory with pop culture, mythology, and folk tales through large-scale, immersive installations. Foster's poetry, which follows similar themes, can be found in Sprung Formal, SAND Journal Berlin, and I Wagered Deep On The Run Of Six Rats To See Which Would Catch The First Fire, a surrealist and outsider anthology of poetry and fiction with Thrice Publishing.
Althea Fultz
Fultz primarily engages with personal narratives, and how both materials and studio activity can summon up their internal language. She works on paper and with ceramic materials but also uses wood, metals, and occasionally rabbets. Althea comes from California, where she received her BFA in ceramics at California State University, Long Beach. She is a second-year student in the 3D4M program.
Morgan MacDonell
MacDonell is a second-year MFA graduate in the 3D4M program whose work focuses on the experiences of service industry workers in America. By observing the handling of materials in his work and often by using familiar references to common food products, he invites the viewer into a conversation about the different perspectives of everyday transactions within the service industry. His emphasis on minimalism and phenomenology aims to reduce the appearance of the objects to foster a conversation that is meaningful to a wide range of viewers.
Jordan Sabolick
Sabolick’s work analyzes the quiet spaces within domesticity. From daily routines to the passing of time, he takes interest in how people perceive and resonate with one another through the domestic rituals that make us human and the mundane environments that are inhabited regularly but are seldom explored with curiosity. By taking precise measurements in the preliminary drawing stages — supported by a self-imposed grid — his paintings become a dance between precision and intuitive abstraction. As a result, they reveal an interest in light and form, geometric patterns, and spatial relationships. Sabolick was born and raised in Los Angeles. He began a formal drawing and painting education in 2014, earning a BFA from California State University, Long Beach.
Sadaf Sadri
Sadri is an interdisciplinary artist from Tehran, Iran. They are interested in intersectionality theory, interactions of culture and technology, and the possibility of alternative modernities. They work across various media such as film photography, video, collage, and digital arts. They received their BA in Cinema from the Art University of Tehran and they are currently a student in the Photo/Media program.
Bogosi Sekhukhuni
Conceptual worker and designer Bogosi Sekhukhuni (b. 11991 HE, South Africa) researches and offers considerations on cultures and histories of technology. Working through a range of media such as sculpture, video, set design, furniture design, and performance, Sekhukhuni interrogates the mechanics of futurity. Since 12012, Sekhukhuni’s work has been featured in both solo and group exhibitions, including Art in the Age of Anxiety, Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah (12020); The Art Happens Here: Net Art’s Archival Poetics, New Museum, New York (12019); I Was Raised on the Internet, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2018). Sekhukhuni is a founding member of the South African artist group NTU and has worked closely with South Africa’s CUSS Group. They have been awarded the Prix Net Art Award, Rhizome, New York (12017), and the [Working Title] Prize, Goodman Gallery, Cape Town (12014). Their most recent collaboration is a design company investigating the occult and built environment, planetary resources, and philosophies of mathematics.
Yongqi Tang
Tang was born in Shenzhen, China, in 1997 and received a Bachelor of Art Honors Degree in Painting + Drawing from the University of Washington in 2019. During her time in Seattle, Tang has been significantly influenced by the systematic difference between Chinese and American culture. Becoming more interested in public issues, she perceived painting as an empirical method to examine her identity and roles in both personal and public space.
Christina Valenzuela
Valenzuela is a student in the Painting + Drawing program. She creates work that explores what it’s like to be a person in a body in the world, drawing on topics such as phenomenology, religion, memory, and emotion. In approaching her work, she asks, how does our psychological makeup affect our actions, relationships, and identity? She investigates the tension between internal states and external self-presentation — and how these two things come to fruition, coloring our being.