The University of Idaho Argonaut

For one of three graduate students presenting their artwork at Friday’s MFA Thesis Exhibition at the Prichard Art Gallery, the experience marks both a beginning and an end.
Friday through May 3 the gallery will host the exhibit featuring work from three graduate students at UI: Jana Brubaker, Douglas Burns and Jessica Semzock.
Burns said that his work that is going to be on display explores the relationship between violence and creation.

“In many cases a violent act is necessary for the act of creation to take place. The building of roads, cities, and even the cosmos require this,” he said.
His work consists of maps of known places that he’s destroyed and re-constructed as he thought they should be.
“I remove roads, vanquish entire cities, and restructure water flow to compose an environment I feel could be more sustainable than what currently exists,” Burns said.

Burns said he will also be showing work that deals with the fractal-like patterning of water on the surface of the Earth and its similarity to the patterns of delivery systems in our bodies, such as the nervous and circulatory systems.
“I do this in order to highlight the similarity in the creation of these systems that appear to be vastly different from one another at first glance,” he said.
Burns said his inspiration for the work that will be displayed at the exhibit came from many areas, including maps, GIS (geographical information systems), satellite images, electron microscope images, Chinese Buddhist art, and philosophy.

Burns originally graduated from the University of Oregon in 2005 with a Bachelors of Fine Art, but really found his calling to art back in 1999 at Rogue Community College in southern Oregon while taking a beginner art class.
“I had to make an oil painting, and in the first stroke realized I had found something special,” he said.
Burns said the exhibit is both the beginning and the end for him.

“It marks the end of my time in the MFA program, yet it marks the beginning of my lifelong personal exploration into art and sharing it with the community,” he said.
Following his graduation from the UI, Burns said he plans to live in the area for a few years to create art and gain inspiration from the wonderful wilderness areas that are located in the state.
“If the future permits, my goal is to land a job which involves teaching art and inspiring young minds to explore everything that surrounds them,” Burns said.
Brubaker, whose work that will be on display is about trauma and taboos, said this exhibit will mean the culmination of three years of intense research, reading, writing, art-making, teaching and learning.

She said that if she could say where she found the inspiration for her prints and paintings, she would be a goddess.
“But I am a mere mortal, an artist, more like a mathematician, as it has to do a lot with measuring. All I do is shove dirt around on a surface,” Brubaker said.
She originally received her BFA with an emphasis in painting and drawing from the University of Utah, and said that when it comes to her graduate experience here at UI, she’s enjoyed her drawing students and her graduate committee members.
“Without their support, encouragement, and tools of theory and critical thinking, I wouldn’t have crossed the many thresholds

I have crossed over the last three years,” she said.
Brubaker already moved out of Moscow over a year ago, but said she already knows what she misses.
“The people of course. And the Farmers’ Market. I rarely wake early enough on summer Saturdays to make it into town to enjoy the market,” she said.
The MFA Thesis Exhibition will open on Friday at the Prichard Art Gallery, with a reception from 5 to 8 p.m., and run through May 3.