Bannister Gallery 2022-23 Exhibitions

Rhode Island College 3-D Faculty Exhibition

Watch the Artist Talk with William Martin

• September 1–23, 2022
• Opening Reception: Thursday, September 1, 4–7 pm

Bannister Gallery opens the 2022-23 exhibition schedule with our Annual Faculty Exhibition, which offers an opportunity for the community to experience first-hand the artistic talent that is in residence at Rhode Island College. These faculty artists are integral to the current aesthetic and conceptual dialogues present in our studio art department. Their practices include research-based and interdisciplinary methods that are at the core of contemporary art. RIC’s faculty artists exhibit widely and receive prestigious awards, grants, fellowships, and residencies. As a result, they encourage students by their example to think across boundaries. Collectively, these distinguished, award-winning artists bring a unique vision to the region’s cultural tapestry.

DiMoDA 4.0: Dis/Location

• October 6–28, 2022
• Opening Reception: Thursday, October 6, 4–7 pm

View the Artist and Curator Talk

DiMoDA, conceived in 2013 by Alfredo Salazar-Caro and William Robertson, is a pioneering virtual institution, dedicated to commissioning and exhibiting cutting edge VR artworks. DiMoDA 4.0, curated by Christiane Paul (Professor of Media Studies at the New School and Adjunct Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art), comprises three artworks — by artists Banz & Bowinkel, Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga, and Tamiko Thiel — addressing the theme of Dis/Location, the feeling of displacement from or disturbance of a proper, original, or usual place that has become a defining experience of our time. The projects explore issues from gentrification and evolution to perceptions of space afforded by technologies. Users explore displacement from neighborhoods; the shifts occurring in the evolution of the earth from its creation to the Anthropocene; as well as our communication with the binary operations of computers.

This exhibition is facilitated by Professor Frank WANG Yefeng.

Harriet and David Brisson: From High Craft to Hypergraphics

• November 14–December 9, 2022
• Opening Reception: Thursday, November 17, 4–7 pm

Facilitated by Professor Heemong Kim, this exhibition honors the individual and collaborative careers of Harriet E. Brisson and David W. Brisson.

Harriet and David provided mutual support and criticism of each other's work, as well as working intensely together. David's path evolved from Abstract Expressionist painting to innovative techniques for describing and visualizing higher-dimensional geometric objects. Harriet moved fluidly from traditional methods of producing ceramics to the use of solar power to sculpture and infinity boxes using neon and glass. In addition to producing and exhibiting material work, they each gave lectures, published scholarly papers, and organized and participated in conferences and workshops. They were founding members of the Hypergraphics movement, a collective of scientists and artists spanning art, geometry, chemistry and physics that held symposia and exhibitions from 1976 through 1984. The continued work and influence of this cutting edge group has grown and multiplied over the ensuing decades.

Recent Acquisitions: Rhode Island College Permanent Artwork Collection

• January 19–February 3, 2023
• Artist Talk with Jesse Burke and Opening Reception: Thursday, January 19, 4–7 pm

View the Artist Talk

Join us Thursday, January 19th, for a special artist talk from photographer Jesse Burke, who will discuss two of his series - Wild & Precious and Intertidal - which are represented in our permanent collection.

The Rhode Island College Permanent Artwork Collection, which consists of over 500 works of art ranging across mediums, geographic origins, and time periods, predates the 1978 founding of the Bannister Art Gallery. Thanks to generous and significant donations over the last three years, we have been able to strengthen the quality of our permanent collection and to increase the diversity of represented artists and subjects. New artists that are now featured in the collection include Marisol Escobar, Karel Appel, and Keisai Eisen. Visit the gallery from January 19th through February 3rd to see just a glimpse of our permanent collection holdings!

Mediums and Messengers

• February 16–March 17, 2023
• Curator and Artist Talk, in the gallery: Thursday, February 16, 4–5 pm
• Opening Reception: Thursday, February 16, 5–7 pm

Mediums and Messengers, curated by Danni Shen,is a group exhibition of six artists and collectives, Beatrice Glow, He Kunlin, lololol, Yuri Pattison, Tiffany Sia, and Frank WANG Yefeng, which takes a critical and experimental approach to “new media” by drawing out the material, historical, and geopolitical formations that underlie various technological interfaces as well as their aesthetics. By working through modes and platforms such as Fiverr, Google Moon, interstellar travelogue, anti-travelogue, the doom scroll, war and time-keeping technologies, to online Daoist exercises, martial arts, and scriptures, such works examine how information is both shielded and revealed through various forms of production.

In 1964, Marshall McLuhan infamously wrote “the medium is the message,” to express how a means of communication itself could tell us more about structural societal changes than the information that it carried. As this “Information Age” hurtles toward what seems to be an inevitable technological singularity (and future) ruled by big tech, surveillance, artificial intelligence, cognitive capitalism, and mass media–the question of “technology” surges to the fore as a highly contentious one. Through artmaking, how can we think about technology in different ways beyond the ever “new”, omnipresent, digital stream that carries us away, disembodied and out of control?

It is thus at the precarious intersection of medium and message that the diverse artists in this exhibition also intervene. Mediums and Messengers also acknowledges the different divisions of space, time, bodies, labor, social relations, and culturally-specific rituals that are encoded into technological existence as well as history. As Matteo Pasquinelli writes on the algorithm for example, “it is an abstract diagram that emerges from the repetition of a process…it is not a rule that is invented from above but emerges from below.” It is from this heterogeneous, often unseen “below”, that we might think about how to take back power and generate more diverse techniques of knowledge. At the heart of this show is also an invitation to consider different approaches to "new media" art that complicate the binary of virtual and physical worldmaking.

Mediums and Messengers: on Shifting Discourses in “New Media” and “Technology”

Brief Reading List

• Matteo Pasquinelli, “three-thousand years of algorithmic rituals: the emergence of AI from the computation of space”, eflux
• "Embodying Virtual Reality: Tactility and Self-Movement in the Work of Char Davies" by Mark B. N. Hansen (in Bodies in Code, 2006)
• Critical Art Ensemble, Electronic Civil Disobedience and other unpopular ideas
• Yuk Hui, The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics, 2018
• Yuk Hui, “On Technodiversity”
• Xiaowei Wang, Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside, 2020
• Electronic Disobedience
• Digital Diaspora: A Race for Cyberspace, Anna Everett, 2009

New Explorations in Mediascapes and Memoryscapes

• March 30–April 21, 2023
• Opening Reception and Performance: Thursday, March 30, 4–7 pm

Watch the Opening Reception Performance, Organized by Artist A Young Yu and Dancer Luyan Li

Artist Talk by Antonius Bui

• Thursday, April 20, 5–6 pm

Curated by Julia Wintner, New Explorations in Mediascapes and Memoryscapes brings together six artists, Karen Azoulay, Antonius Bui, Natalia Nakazawa, Sagarika Sundaram, Yelaine Rodriguez, and A young Yu, who interpret their personal histories and longing for home utilizing a wide array of media. They use digital and hand-drawn media, interactive objects, and lush sound design to create meditative memoryscapes. Their work explores human perception and connection as a vehicle for self-knowledge.

Annual Graduating Art Students' Exhibition

• May 4–19, 2023
• Opening Reception: Thursday, May 4, 4–7 pm
• Special Commencement Hours: Saturday, May 13, 12–3 pm

Watch Michael Mollicone's Artist Talk

The Bannister Gallery is pleased to present its annual exhibition of work by graduating seniors in the Art Department. Various studio concentrations represented include ceramics, metalsmithing, painting, printmaking, digital media, graphic design, photography and sculpture. Degrees earned through the Art Department include a BS in Art Education, a BFA in Art Education, a BA in Art History, a BA in Art Studio, and a BFA in Art Studio, the latter of which requires students to develop a stylistically accomplished and conceptually focused body of work. The exhibition also celebrates work by Senior Award winner Michael Mollicone, Harriet Brisson Award in Ceramics recipient Marisol Martinez Kritikos, and Mary Ball Howkins Art History Award recipient Gabrielle Patrone.