The spring 2022 exhibitions are now available at the Ulrich Museum of Art. The exhibitions all share one thing in common — all showcase works from innovative women artists.
The four new shows will be available for view until May 7. Three of the exhibits will be on display at the Ulrich during regular gallery hours (11 a.m.-5 p.m., Monday-Saturday.) A special Ulrich Connections exhibition will be held off-site at the Grace Memorial Chapel, and will be on display 8 a.m.- 8 p.m., Monday-Friday. All exhibitions are free and open to the public.
Ulrich Director Leslie Brothers said she was excited to unveil the new exhibitions, which feature works from Finnish video artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Lebanese American artist Annabel Daou, and Wichita artist Ann Resnick.
“We have a wide range of exciting shows to share with you this spring,” Brothers said. “Everyone from acclaimed international artists to one of our most beloved local artists, and all of them examine deep subjects, from mental health to social justice to loss.”
Several programs related to these exhibitions are scheduled through the spring. The four shows on display include the following:
The Annunciation and The Bridge: Eija-Liisa Ahtila — Since the 1990s, Ahtila has been a pioneer of immersive video installations that expand on the possibilities of cinema as an art form. Ahtila does this by making multiple perspectives visible at the same time and offering a new mode of meditative viewing of time-based works in gallery spaces. This will be the first presentation of work by Ahtila in Kansas and the Great Plains region. The Annunciation takes as its starting point one of the best-known Christian stories — the moment when the Archangel Gabriel visits the Virgin Mary to announce that she will give birth to the Son of God. The Bridge is about mental breakdown and the experience of psychosis. The work is based on interviews conducted by the artist with real women but the story and the dialogue in the video are fictional. A mother who is on her way to pick up her young daughter walks through the streets of Helsinki as she narrates her experience of dealing with resurfaced repressed memories of childhood abuse and the resulting mental breakdown. When she comes to a bridge and falls, she is unable to get back up. She is ultimately able to cross the bridge only by crawling on all fours. Metaphor and fact blur in the film, as do past and present. The film is a poignant depiction of psychosis triggered by trauma that allows viewers to empathize with the narrator’s embodied first-person experience.
Chapter & Verse: Ann Resnick — Resnick has been making conceptually complex and visually sumptuous art for more than forty years. She starts with the personal—her own family history, marriage, broad reading tastes and friendships. She then turns the raw materials of her life into deeply moving universal ruminations on loss and remembrance, the need to capture intangible emotional ties through tangible objects and the beauty that can be found in the awareness of the finitude of our time on earth. Resnick is also a pillar of contemporary art in Wichita who has worked for twenty-five years as a gallerist, activist and exhibiting artist. Though she has shown her work nationally and internationally, much of her work has never been seen in Wichita. This exhibition will present the highlights of her artistic career going back to the 1990s while showcasing her inventiveness in a variety of media.
DECLARATION: Annabel Daou — Daou’s exhibit will be displayed at WSU’s Grace Memorial Chapel. In 2020, Daou created the sound piece DECLARATION in collaboration with the sound artist Miriam Schickler. The work features Daou’s voice reciting phrases from the scroll as first-person actions, interspersed with a mix of sounds, both of peaceful city life and chants from recent protests in Chile, Lebanon and other places around the world. The Ulrich acquired the piece for its permanent collection in 2021.