Cravens World inspires new exhibition in UB Art Gallery

UB’s Cravens World Collection provided the catalyst for artwork in a new exhibition opening in the UB Art Gallery in the Center for the Arts.

“Re:res: Contemporary Interpretations of the Cravens World Collection,” will be on exhibit from Nov. 12 through Dec. 12. An opening reception will take place from 5-7 p.m. Nov. 12 in the gallery.

Taking their impetus from specific objects in the collection, as well as the open storage display methods used to house the Cravens World Collection in the UB Anderson Gallery, eight artists produced new work that manifests concerns of cultural appropriation, utility, value and subjectivity. The exhibition’s title is derived from the prefixes “re” — with reference to — and “res” — a thing, matter or object.

While still retaining their individual artistic practice, each artist’s work makes reference to the Cravens World Collection as its resource. Donated to the UB Art Galleries by Annette Cravens in 2008, the Cravens World Collection is an astonishing amalgam of nearly 1,100 archaeological and ethnographic objects spanning the globe and dating as far back as 4,500 BC.

For this exhibition, select objects from the Cravens World Collection will be on view alongside the artists’ work.

The exhibition is curated by Katherine Gaudy, graduate curatorial assistant in the UB Department of Art.

The artists:

• Skylar Borgstrom, a current UB MFA and native of Alberta, Canada, is questioning the fault lines connecting museum display tactics and the values prescribed by them. Her work brings to the surface the way presentation reveals the manipulation of perceptions.
• Caitlin Cass, a Buffalo-based artist, has more than a knack for inscribing idiosyncratic interpretations of history into pictorial narrative. For “Re:res,” Cass presents a series of gouache drawings featuring an object from the Cravens collection that she refers to as “the woman with the worried, lonely, sunken eyes … through the historic dreamscape of the Cravens collection.”
• Buffalo artist AJ Fries takes his signature gray-scale palette to implant images of Cravens artifacts on a secondhand store painting in order to comment directly on the persistent nature of cultural appropriation.
• Kristine Mifsud, an artist working in Toronto, has built her practice out of an intuitive fascination with small, found metal objects she calls “Unidentified Metal Objects (UMO).” For this exhibition, she has re-engaged a lost value for these objects by mimicking the Cravens World Collection display of currency.
• Carl Spartz, a current UB MFA student originally from Texas, has built a digital environment, taking the viewer on a tour of economic artifacts through a possible futuristic gallery of the hyperreal.
• Mark Tomko, a Buffalo-based artist, presents “a selection of idiosyncratic anomaly objects” from his own archive as floating in an abyss.
• Buffalo native Kurt Treeby works primarily as a fiber artist replicating historically significant artworks. For this exhibition, he has replicated, by way of crocheting, an early 19th-century French metalsmith hammer. The hammer holds specific significance in that it marks for the artist a link to a like-minded craftsperson, and that it was used in the same country and time period in which crochet developed.
• Necole Zayatz, a Buffalo-based artist, offers an interactive experience with her “Artifacts from the Future.” These artifacts retain techniques present in the Cravens Collection, yet are given fictitious, futuristic narratives.

The UB Art Gallery is open from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and from 1-5 p.m. on Saturday. Admission is free.