Artwork by MFA student Samuel Horgan, 2024.

Meat, bubble gum, and endoscopy— MFA students delve into visceral and sticky subjects in a new round of exhibitions at the Dodd Galleries: Meat-a-physics, Desirable, and Endoscope. Join us this Thursday October 10 at 270 River Road from 6 - 8 pm to celebrate three new shows parsing the ins and outs of the body and the home. These exhibitions, along with Hong Hong: Inland in the Margie E. West Gallery and Joe Camoosa: Shape Shifting in the Plaza Gallery, will be on view through November 7.

Learn more below!

Gabrielle Barnett: Desirable in the Suite Gallery

Flesh, like bubblegum, is soft, sticky, and pliable. In pristine shape, both flesh and gum are desirable. Distinctly, however, chewed gum is disposable, invisible, and hard to look at. Individuals that have fat bodies are frequently socially isolated and denied access to societal structures. Those of us who are fat are continuously reminded of our body sizes and how they do not fit into the world. Shame plays a large role in enforcing fatphobia in our society. Most people think of shame for larger, memorable events, but MFA student Gabrielle Barnett argues that the smaller moments are the ones that lead to internalisation of fatphobia. The thinner a person is, the more unnoticed these constant, small bits of shame are. Bodies move in and out of visibility based on the setting and the company that they occupy.  

This work is as much an exploration into Barnett's life as it is a study of how a fat person interprets and navigates the world. We must take care to see those who feel unseen.

Artwork (detail) by MFA student Gabrielle Barnett, 2024.

Samuel Horgan: Endoscope in the Lupin Foundation Gallery

The act of endoscopy materializes commonalities between corporeal and built infrastructures. The endoscope simultaneously snakes down pipes and the body of a patient in examination. Curated by Art History MA student Kelsey Siegert, Endoscope stages a series of encounters with subterranean space through scale models, drawings, and video. Each work by MFA student Samuel Horgan illustrates an anecdotal history of buried structures coming into view, of vision penetrating beneath the surface of the everyday into the underground of death and desire. Assignations are viewed through a glass block window, erosion and subsidence reveal root structures, coal seams burn in perpetuity, and passageways open up to a hollow earth.

Exhibition poster for group show MEAT-a-physics, featuring works by 8 MFA students.

MEAT-a-physics in the Bridge Gallery

With a pattern of spatial organization that resembles the key elements of the contemporary domestic home, and visual content to match, MEAT-a-physics invites audiences to come in and stay for a while as they ponder and explore what the experienced idea of home living means to them, what it has meant for others before them, and what it will mean for those in the future. Calling on meat and the domestic object as a functional symbol for the individual, artists Brian George, Hannah Touissant, Hayden Maltese, Izzy Losskarn, Jana Ghezawi, Kate Luther, Rae Haight, and Sarah Bouchard put forth a visually diverse exhibition which calls on the viewer to reflect broadly across multiple lines of inquiry related to the conceptual interpretation of Western domesticity.