From Beginning to End: Heath Ballowe and Fonda Yoshimoto

From Beginning to End

October 30-December 18

Reception: October 29 from 6pm-8pm

Our lives are inextricably linked. The artists in this exhibition explore birth, life, and death in different ways, all attempting to understand their own relationship with the world.

Our lives have a beginning and end whether we believe it is predetermined or by chance, we all experience our world in different ways. Some believe that personal stories and memories are what define our lives. Some fixate on illness and our progression towards death while others take comfort in the fact that they are part of a cycle that is ongoing. Even though we look at life differently we will experience birth and new beginnings as well as mourn the loss of someone close.

This exhibition asks the viewer to reflect on and question their own personal feelings about life and death, and leave with a deeper understanding of their own mortality.

Saturday, November 21, 2009

Heath Ballowe and Fonda Yoshimoto

Heath Ballowe, Printmaking MFA 2010

Fonda Yoshimoto, Ceramics MFA 2010

Immortality Through Regeneration

Heath Ballowe and Fonda Yoshimoto both use memory as a starting point in their work. In Immortality Through Regeneration, the idea of memory carries over as they explore the impressions we leave behind as we live our lives. Our impressions can be permanent or ephemeral and are evidence of where we have been and where we are going. At first glance the piece appears to be an open sarcophagus, but upon closer examination, the interior space contains the earth inside with the impressions of two bodies with the life masks of the artists. One can imagine the body sinking into the earth leaving this marking behind. This container is representative of more than death as the human form becomes a place for something to grow and transform into something living. The permanence of the life masks slowly becomes obscured, swallowed into the earth over time.

From Beginning to End