Tyler School of Art is pleased to announce the 2015/16 Distinguished Alumni Mentoring Program exhibition: Hope Ginsburg: Breathing on Land: Bay of Fundy and Misha Wyllie: Out to Lunch. These exhibitions are the result of a six-month mentorship between Hope Ginsburg (BFA ‘96) and Misha Wyllie (MFA ‘14). The exhibition will open on May 4 with a reception from 6:00 – 8:00 pm and will continue until July 15.

Hope Ginsburg’s Breathing on Land takes meditation with scuba gear as a starting point to refocus attention on our bodies, their contexts and the health of our atmosphere. The practice of breathing on land with scuba gear makes for a kind of assisted meditation – the discomfort of the equipment keeps the wearer in mind of their physical presence. Land Dive Team: Bay of Fundy, a single channel video projection with sound, is Ginsburg’s largest video production to date. An audio score, composed by Joshua Quarles, captures the change in the sound of their breaths as they shifted from the hiss of breathing on land to the gurgle of breathing under water.

Misha Wyllie’s Out to Lunch employs institutional aesthetics in order to see their impact on what and why we learn. Through education, we acquire knowledge and skills in order to use them for another purpose. How do we decide what that purpose is? How does this purpose shape the process of learning itself? Wyllie addresses these questions by treating institutional strategies for managing knowledge as a skill-set to be used in art making. Works on paper that repurpose dictionaries and bureaucratic documents employ strategies for organizing information in order to understand these systems. Wyllie also presents an installation of fragments from the interior spaces of learning institutions, directing the attention to the experiences that happen there.