The Mississippi State Art Gallery’s 2006-2007 season continues in March with an exhibit by photographic artist Brian Ulrich titled “Not If But When.”The exhibit expands the season’s variety even further, with a stark contrast to the fall semester’s Japanese woodblock prints and Io Palmer’s sculptures.
“Brian Ulrich primarily uses the method of photography to investigate his visual and cultural surroundings, and recently he’s found great degrees of success using large-scale format photography,” gallery director Bill Andrews said. “He uses a large-view camera. View cameras typically use a larger negative so you can blow them up and get much greater detail in the enlarged prints. This is what he’s been using to investigate areas of our culture in the ‘Copia’ and ‘Thrift’ series of photographs.”
“Copia” investigates the prevalence of the mass-production, consumerist society in which Americans live, Andrews said. “Thrift” is what happens to all man-made things once they have worn out their use.
Brian Ulrich was born in 1971 in Northport, N.Y. He currently resides in Chicago.
Ulrich’s work has been displayed in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, the Robert Koch Gallery in San Francisco and the Sean Kelly Gallery in New York, among others.
His art is permanently displayed in the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, the Martin Maguiles Collection and the La Salle Bank Photography Collection. Ulrich has contributed to Adbusters magazine, New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, Wired, Fortune, Seed, Spin and The Salvation Army. Ulrich is currently an instructor of photography, Web design and visual literacy at the Art Institute of Chicago and Columbia College.
The MSU art department aims for students to take advantage of the opportunity to view Ulrich’s work.
“I think it’s an important concept, the idea that we need to be very aware of what we as a society and a culture produce and use and what happens to it after we’re finished with it,” Andrews said. “Also, I think Brian Ulrich is a master of this art form. The works are very contemporary, owing to their large size, and I think everyone will enjoy seeing them.”
Ulrich’s work continues the gallery’s tradition of variety.
“Every year in the gallery we try and have programming that involves a lot of different art from different cultures and different times, and that really … displays how art inevitably is tied into human history and culture,” Andrews said. “We can learn a lot about where we are now by looking at where we’ve been, and these exhibits do that. I’d love to see people there; I think it’s important that we have a gallery here in this university, and I think it’s important that people see what’s going on in it.”
The exhibit is located on the ground floor of McComas Hall. Viewing hours are Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Sunday from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. For more information, visit Ulrich’s Web site at notifbutwhen.com or call the department of art at 325-2970.