At a time where society seems to be constantly talking about diversity, two artists are using empty faces and absent eyes to invite viewers to bring their own sense of identity to these images.
The current exhibit at the University of Idaho Prichard Art Gallery, called “Whipping It Up: A Collaborative Alchemy,” features a collection of work by Western Washington University professors Garth Amundson and Pierre Gour. The project will be showcased through Oct. 6.
Amundson, an American, and Gour, a Canadian, have collaborated for more than 30 years together, using historic imagery to talk about their experiences and explore how these experiences can be seen as a universal topic.
Each project in the exhibit is a record of what’s happening in their lives, Amundson said.
As a queer couple, Amundson said the two have faced many issues regarding immigration politics and identity struggles, which have inspired their work.
“We use our own lived experience as a point of departure for making our work,” Amundson said.
Throughout their relationship, Amundson said their basic human rights have been breached constantly. They use their work to document that struggle, but also to celebrate their victories as times and societal views change.
The exhibit at the Prichard features a variety of historical images that have been scanned, assembled digitally, printed and physically altered. The most common alteration is the removal of peoples’ faces with a utility knife.
Using their family pictures and historical documents, Amundson and Gour said they cut out the faces to invite the audience to put their own face in each situation and to establish a dialogue with the viewer.
While Amundson said the primary drive for making art shouldn’t be the audience’s understanding of it, he said the couple hopes their work makes people think “what if?” regarding same-sex relationships and immigration politics.
Roger Rowley, director of the Prichard Art Gallery, played a major role in bringing the exhibit together. Amundson said Rowley saw value in putting certain pieces of their work together and worked with the artists to develop the current exhibition.
Rowley said a major goal for the exhibit was to question assumptions about stereotypes of diversity in society.
“One can talk about multiculturalism and say diversity has overtaken everything, and yet the need in society to address these issues has never been greater,” Rowley said. “For us, visual culture is an important means by which to make these issues present in our community, present in students’ lives.”
One of the displays Rowley installed with the help of gallery assistants, students and faculty, called “HEAD(S),” is a compilation of the cut-out faces from images throughout the gallery. Rowley worked to create a 12-foot circle, full of various-sized faces, pinned inches from the wall. As a result, the piece almost moves with patterns of dense, sparsely arranged heads.
Other displays within the exhibit include “Ghost-Written,” a series of portraits from which the eyes have been cut out, and “Button Prints.”
“Ghost-Written” was initially a response to the way in which people viewed the two North American artists as a couple, Gour said.
They were basically invisible to society because marriage between same-sex couples was previously not recognized, he said.
The project was based on the idea that LGBTQA people were in society, Gour said, but no one was acknowledging who they were.
“We were essentially ghosts walking around because we had no sense of history, no sense of being important and recognized in society,” he said.
Rather than showcasing the artists’ struggles, “Button Prints,” Amundson and Gour’s most current work in the exhibit, represents a positive time in their lives — when the couple lived in Bellagio, Italy, Gour said.
The work — made from buttons sewn onto portraits taken from other areas of the exhibit — focused on discussion and meeting new people, as the artists invited others during their Italian residency to help with the sewing, Gour said.
Rowley said one of his favorite aspects about Amundson and Gour’s work is how they interact with photography.
“I like the combination of different approaches that look at photographic images in a very physical way,” Rowley said. “It’s not this thing that exists momentarily on your phone, it’s turning those fleeting images into something far more physical.”
Rowley said he encourages people to visit the gallery and put themselves into the couple’s images, to see themselves as part of that history and question their own personal narrative.
“The viewer should become a participant in the work, immersed within the installation itself, surrounded by the work,” Gour said.
Jordan Willson can be reached at [email protected]