UIS Visual Arts Gallery presents "Lay of the Land" exhibition

Lay of the Land, an exhibition of work by artists Karen Bondarchuk and Terrence Campagna opens at the University of Illinois Springfield Visual Arts Gallery on March 31 and closes with a reception on April 22 (Earth Day) from 5:30-8 p.m. The reception and exhibit are free and open to the public. The two artists create works from found and discarded materials that questions the relationship between production and consumption in contemporary society.

Bondarchuk and Campagna were co-winners of last year’s (2010) Sustain international juried exhibition at the UIS Visual Arts Gallery, and were awarded a two-person show by a guest juror, environmental activist and author Terry Tempest Williams. The Sustain show featured works by 13 artists addressing three vital components of sustainability: resource conservation, social justice, and economic equity. The gallery is pleased to present a more comprehensive exhibition of these two innovative artists’ ideas, and to consider any new relationships that may arise between their similarly motivated, but very different works of art.

Artists Karen Bondarchuk and Terrence Campagna give a new and resonant life to mundane, seemingly dead materials that our culture produces, uses, and finally abandons. Bondarchuk's process begins by scavenging for materials along the shoulders of interstate highways while Campagna makes his collections anywhere from roadways and railroad tracks to city streets and parking lots.

The materials that both artists gather from the land reference our industrial “on the go” culture—blown out truck and car tires, fast food packaging, disposable containers, among other everyday bits and pieces. These artists explore the places where most of us feel urged to quickly pass through (highways, streets, parking lots, etc). Inspired by both the throwaway materials and the largely uninhabitable spaces in which they are found, Bondarchuk and Campagna create objects that awaken our capacity for contemplation as well as our desire to care for and make sense of the world around us.

The UIS Visual Arts Gallery is centrally located on the UIS campus in the Health and Science Building (HSB 201). Gallery hours are Monday-Thursday from 11 a.m. – 6 p.m. The gallery will also be open 11 a.m. – 8 p.m. on Friday, April 22, 2011. For more information contact the gallery by phone at 217/206-6506 or by email at: gallery@uis.edu Website: www.uis.edu/visualarts/gallery.html