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Yost Gallery to Feature Work by Highland Visual Arts Faculty September 23 - October 25

published September 20, 2019

Yost Gallery, located on the main campus of Highland Community College in Highland, KS, will show work by HCC faculty starting September 23 through October 25. Works will include Photography, paintings, sculpture and illustration by Alexis Clements, Instructor of Photography and Digital Arts, Samuel Perkins, Instructor of Graphic Design, and Todd Meier, Instructor of Art. Below are the artist’s statements on the work.

 

Todd Meier, Instructor of Art:

I enjoy making works of art that create a structure and subverts that structure or creates an unbelievable structure. 

 

My goal is to be an antithesis to absolutes. The adults in my life when I was younger rarely showed any sign of uncertainty. It’s something that I have to check myself on, and it’s something that I see in our culture. Twitter, for example, is rarely a place where people admit they’re uncertain, we rarely have a place in our culture that is not for absolutes. 

 

So, not only do I want my surfaces to be a place where any absolute is subverted, I choose my subject matter/title to reflect that as well. 

 

If I can get anyone to admit, even just for the slightest moment, and just to themselves, that they do not know everything that exists, then that is a success. 

 

 

Samuel Dean Perkins​, Instructor of Graphic Design:

I am and have always been compulsively driven to make things.  This gnawing need has guided my journey and the way I observe the world around me. 

 

In my latest work, I'm exploring the memories of my youth.  As we leave our post-industrial society, we tend to forget our leap from the previous agricultural society.  Growing up in a rural setting it was all too clear, times change.  I was fascinated and mesmerized by the hulking, rusty machinery I found in my daily wanderings.  These archaic relics begged for me to explore, label, and imagine a time when they shook the earth.  I didn't know what a thresher did or was, I saw a monolithic war machine, or perhaps a skeletal beast of burden languishing among the detritus.  

 

I am currently seeking to recreate this feeling of mechanical obsolescence as if born from this crossover industrial age when products were designed for longevity but were often crude, elegant, loud and quiet all at once.

 

Alexis Clements, Instructor of Photography and Digital Arts:

My personal relationship to photography investigates where words and images converge, where memories become mythologies, and how environments contribute to personal narratives.  I believe through photography I can convey the secrets of discarded, forgotten, or overlooked subjects and environments. I am interested in how photographs become melancholic objects; that no matter who or what is depicted, the photographer and the viewer want to believe that the photograph is exposing the essence of a subject.  Moments are fleeting and photographs are a dialogue with impermanence.

 

The images I am presented in this exhibition are a selection of works from personal and documentary projects. These projects range from creating constructed narratives, visual studies of form, image appropriation, and a preoccupation with events currently shaping the American psyche.

 

The Yost Gallery on the Highland campus is open to the community Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. with no admission fee. 

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