Remember a Place Not Here

 A MESSAGE FROM THE GALLERY DIRECTOR

The title of this year’s show is Remember a Place Not Here, and indeed many of the artists in the show are making work that recreates the feeling of a distant location. Others work to create an environment that seems impossible in reality, and still others make work that holds space for those who are denied it. Of course, there are pieces in the show that address other issues as each artist pursues their own questions and interests in their own ways, but it is difficult to avoid seeing certain themes recur again and again in the galleries.

This class began their college experience with the pandemic. As incredibly varied and individual as these artists are, the pandemic is something that impacted every single one of them. Every student in this show spent years in a highly mediated form of semi-isolation, interacting with friends, family, classmates, and teachers from behind a screen. It is perhaps not terribly surprising that so much work in this exhibition welcomes visitors into private spaces of memory, and invites viewers to inhabit the artists’ personal experiences. When students have found themselves separated from beloved locations by geography, time, politics, or the pandemic, it makes perfect sense that multiple works reference these far-flung homes in intricately realized detail.

Studio Art, Architecture, Media Arts & Sciences, and Cinema & Media Studies majors are well-represented, but there are students with over 15 different majors and minors exhibiting work this year. Media like oil painting, traditional printmaking practices, and weaving share space with digital film, virtual reality, and 3D rendering. Making and meaning are at the center of what we do in the Art Department, and those majoring in the arts engage with the field in a deeply meaningful way. But this year’s Thesis and Senior Exhibition is evidence of the importance of the arts all across campus, especially in a time when these artists have been denied so many of the experiences that were open to many before them.

Every artist in this show remembers a place not here. And every artist in this show will go on to move Wellesley from their present to the realm of their memories, adding layers upon layers of memories on top of that, ever onwards as they make their way through the world. We are lucky to be invited in by so many of them this year, and we can only look forward to seeing what places they build for their communities, their families, and themselves in the years to come.

Congratulations to the Class of 2023. 

--Samara Pearlstein

Gallery Director

May 2023

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