Visual Vernacular, Icons and the Hand-Crafted Book

“Denizens 2: The Lovers” by Brandon Sanderson

“Mixtura” by Kathy O’Connell

The MTSU Department of Art’s Todd Art Gallery hosts “Visual Vernacular, Icons, and the Hand-Crafted Book,” a show billed as explorations of hand-printed materials and book forms and featuring new Department of Art faculty members Andrew Kosten, Kathy O’Connell and Ashley Hairston. Respectively, they represent the art areas of printmaking, book arts and graphic design. Also included in the exhibit, on display through March 22, is the invited work of some of the trio’s contemporaries and associates including Brandon Sanderson, Matt Hopson-Walker and Amos Kennedy.

Discussing his work in the exhibit’s printmaking portion, Andrew Kosten states, “Throughout its all too often tragic history, humanity has turned to the comical, the bizarre, and the extraordinary in order to maintain a sense of lightheartedness. . . . Throughout the history of art, issues involving the human condition have provided the most challenging and engaging critiques of human behavior.”

Kathy O’Connell’s “Mixtura” represents the “Hand-Crafted Book” portion of the exhibit and is an international book arts project inspired by food that includes independent arts studio Taller 72 (Lima, Peru) and a total of 16 artists through an Access and Diversity Grant from MTSU. The “Mixtura” artists, along with Kathy, represent a wide diversity of nations also including France, Japan, Romania, South Korea and the United States.

Ashley Hairston’s work from her Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) thesis, “The Space Between,” will also be on display. About the work, she states, “‘The Space Between’ is a means of translating the personal into public for conceptual action and art. I investigate identity formation and societal pre-judgments,” Hairston explains. “I am interested in how tightly point of view is rooted in identity, a unique combination of traits and experience, both familial and cultural. Much of this is outside the individual’s control, yet defines what we see. More recently,” she adds, “my work concerns itself with the tension of a personal sense of identity that conflicts with cultural expectations, and how that affects and limits personal and relational mobility. The work inquires into how identity navigates the bewildering space between polar opposites.”

“Ba’ath Party” by Andrew Kosten

Brandon Sanderson is an assistant professor of art at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke who teaches multiple levels of drawing and all levels of printmaking including intaglio, lithography and woodcut. He describes his “Denizens Series (Folly of Post-Literacy)” as etchings that explore human folly. The characters are absurdly constructed of mechanical and organic elements. Just like many people, they are unaware of an awkward and ill-conceived nature.

Fellow printmaker Matthew Hopson-Walker took to playing in a band after receiving his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Kansas City Art Institute in 1998. Even so, in 2003 he completed his Masters of Fine Arts degree at the University of Iowa and has since placed work in collections located at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the University of North Dakota Art Collection in Grand Forks, and the Tama Art Museum in Tokyo, Japan. Currently, he teaches at the College of the Sequoias and California State University at Fresno.

All MTSU Todd Art Gallery exhibitions and receptions are free and open to the public.

For more information, contact Eric Snyder at (615) 898-5653 or eric.snyder@mtsu.edu, or visit mtsu.edu/art.