March 29, 2024

Gallery East hosts works by CEU faculty this month

Every other year, the College of Eastern Utah Price campus and San Juan campus art instructors pull their best work together to offer a Faculty Show hosted in the Gallery East during November and December. This year, former San Juan campus art instructor, Ruth Ellen Pollan, who died of breast cancer last summer, will have some of her final work posthumously included with the exhibit. She taught at the school from 1992-2004.

Every other year, the College of Eastern Utah Price campus and San Juan campus art instructors pull their best work together to offer a Faculty Show hosted in the Gallery East during November and December. This year, former San Juan campus art instructor, Ruth Ellen Pollan, who died of breast cancer last summer, will have some of her final work posthumously included with the exhibit. She taught at the school from 1992-2004.
“It’s hard to produce and teach full loads,” Brent Haddock, gallery curator and art instructor said. “We are all working artists in our field who also work fulltime teaching. That’s probably the best reason why we don’t organize more shows.”
Some of us have to produce,” quipped pottery adjunct instructor, Blaine Atwood. This is my only job. He looks at pottery as “not just about form, texture and shape and color.” What gets him excited about pottery is “the creation, discovery and the exploration. It’s about different processes and techniques used in the development of the art work … When all the elements come together and fuse into one extraordinary work of art, that’s when I know I am traveling down the path I was intended. I hope people that view and own my pottery will fee the energy of life that was present at its creation.
Besides Pollan, Haddock and Atwood, the show includes the work of Cliff Bergera and Nate Wilson from CEU’s Price campus and Anthony Lott and Kelly Pugh from CEU’s San Juan campus.
Pollan’s works are landscape oil paintings while Haddock’s expertise is in intaglio printmaking. Wilson’s prints are hand-drawn computer-digital that he incorporated into intaglio printmaking. It’s an image on process that uses non-toxic inks, he said.
Bergera’s work is mixed media on canvas, Kelly’s is acrylic and oil while Lott’s work is primarily oil painting.
Gallery East is open weekdays from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. and is located on the northwest end of the Old Student Activity Center. A reception honoring the artists will be held from 7-9 p.m. on Saturday, November 13 in Gallery East.
The exhibition is funded in part by the Utah Arts Council, the Utah Office of Museum Services, CEU and the National Endowment for the Arts.