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New Harmony Gallery to hold closing reception for Land Report East 6

November 20, 2019

The New Harmony Gallery of Contemporary Art's latest exhibition, Land Report East 6, will host a closing reception from 4 to 6 p.m. Saturday, November 23rd in conjunction with the Harmonist Thanksgiving Feast offered by the Indiana State Museum from 6 to 8 p.m. at Thrall's Opera House. The closing reception is free and open to the public, but tickets are required for the feast.

The Land Report Collective features work from six artists: Leticia Bajuyo, Jason Brown, Brian Jobe, David Jones, Patrick Kikut, Shelby Shadwell. While the exhibition deals with landscape as a foundational reference point, do not expect traditional landscape paintings when you visit the gallery. This group brings together artists from across the nation to explore the concept of land art in a variety of media to create a dialogue within the gallery.

"Although each Land Report artist investigates formal and conceptual issues based in the landscape as an individual, the essence of our collective lies in the intersection between the things each of us point at - as if we were pointing to locations like road signs," the artists say in their collective statement. "New meanings and contexts emerge when viewers see the conversations that open up between works in an exhibition that would not normally occur when pieces are exhibited in isolation. Furthermore, the development of the work for each exhibition is a result of the artists being in direct and indirect dialogue with each other, the spaces they inhabit and the people they interact with there. Through this active process, members of the collective make new work as if it were a conversation, even though each artist acts autonomously and there is no hierarchical structure imposed."

Bajuyo's work is fueled by compassion and a critique of capitalism, as she explores perceptions of value in order to foster an awareness of the role of social amnesia on consumer behavior. Brown considers the politics of mountaintop removal in his construction of objects and installations while also creating playful formal assemblages. Jobe typically creates schemes for public interaction through the delineation of pathways or through site-specific focal points. Jones responds to desert environments with experimental interactions, model scale sculpture, and large-scale outdoor works. Kikut incorporates a lifelong interest in the horizon line in a series of paintings with flat Midwestern landscapes as his muse. Shadwell views the landscape from a non-traditional lens, responding to ephemeral images from highway road cameras, monumental mining operations and the optical nature of the salt flats through drawing, sculpture and video installation.

This activity made possible, in part, with support from the Indiana Arts Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.

The New Harmony Gallery of Contemporary Art is an outreach partner of the University of Southern Indiana. The gallery is located at 506 Main Street in New Harmony, Indiana. Regular hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. For more information, call 812-682-3156 or go to usi.edu/nhgallery

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