Several School of Art students, faculty, and alumni are featured in an exhibition seeking to provide a glimpse into Pittsburgh’s art scene. “Everything Once Arranged Has Become Scattered,” organized and curated by Virginia Commonwealth University’s Applied Curatorial Practices course, in on view at The Anderson in Richmond, VA from February 3 through March 3.
CMU participants are: MFA students Rebecca Shapass and Laura Hudspith; faculty Ross Mantle (CFA photography), Kim Beck, Isla Hansen, and Alisha Wormsley; and alumni Sarah Kim and Jamie Earnest.
“Everything Once Arranged Has Become Scattered” explores Pittsburgh as a site of repeats, rifts, and joints. The exhibition weaves together the work of thirteen artists of various backgrounds interacting with their shared city. Much of the work involves an investigation of a deeply familiar place, as the artists interrogate the constructed thresholds on which they stand, confronting the truisms of the city. The artists connect with the city by digging through physical and metaphorical archives, reworking what they have discovered, or inserting their personal narrative into the city.
Drawing on roads, rubble, bodies, and other physical qualities that, when combined, make a city—much of the work exemplifies the uniqueness of a place. In an echoing of its industrial roots, Pittsburgh today serves as a reservoir for resourcefulness. Seemingly mundane elements are celebrated, and objects of the past transcend their own histories, made new with careful consideration for the future. Charged with self-awareness, humor, and drama, the works of the exhibition imbue humanity into even the most inhuman; cast concrete becomes limbs of bodies and rocks begin to impersonate one another. Using what is available and creating what isn’t, the artists excavate the Pittsburgh landscape for complexity and unearth new ways of seeing. A scattering can portend a re-coming together of a new, extraordinary composition. What will we find at the bottom of the mine?