The Art Gallery at UWF presents “if you can see a thing whole…”

The Art Gallery at the University of West Florida, presents “if you can see a thing whole…”, an exhibition featuring New Orleans based artists Hannah Chalew and Pippin Frisbie-Calder. The exhibition will run from Feb. 10 through March 3. TAG is located in The Center for Fine and Performing Arts, Building 82, on the Pensacola campus. An artist talk and closing reception will be held on March 3 at 6 p.m. in the gallery.

Chalew’s intricate and absorbing drawings of southern Louisiana landscapes examine the lasting effects of fossil fuels and white supremacy. She creates paper from sugar cane — “the chattel slavery crop”— and plastic shreds. Her work confronts the viewer with images of ecological and social disaster, challenging us to consider an alternative future.

Frisbie-Calder’s woodcut prints of ivory-billed woodpeckers depict birds now extinct. She invites visitors to remove a bird from the gallery, thereby emptying the environment. Her vanishing installation invokes our responsibility to larger ecosystems.

“if you can see a thing whole…” is a meditation on loss and the uneasy awareness of our complicity in ecological catastrophe. Chalew and Frisbie-Calder explore legacies of waste and exploitation while suggesting that a radical reimagining of the world we inhabit is possible.

TAG is open Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. All events are free and open to the public. For more information, contact Cat Gambel, Gallery Director, TAG at artgallery@uwf.edu.

The Art Gallery at the University of West Florida seeks to challenge, stimulate and engage students and the greater public through direct interaction with works of contemporary art.