Avantika Bawa:
Food.Control

Exhibition Statement

For its spring exhibitions in 2014, the Schneider Museum of Art presented the first of a two-part exhibition of the Southern Oregon SITE Project, generously supported by The Ford Family Foundation. The project featured two exhibitions created in response to the site: the Museum, Southern Oregon University, and the greater Rogue Valley.

Avantika Bawa is “interested in transforming the act of drawing into sculptural gestures that react formally and also conceptually to architectural spaces and their history.” In flood.control, Avantika Bawa used the history and geography behind the formation of Emigrant Lake as the conceptual parameters from which her installation was created.

As an artist, Heidi Schwegler states that she “is drawn to the peripheral ruin, modifying discarded objects in order to give them a new sense of purpose.” Her work from her residency is entitled Visibility Near Zero. She earned her MFA from the University of Oregon and is Associate Chair of the MFA in Applied Craft + Design, a joint Oregon College of Art and Craft and Pacific Northwest College of Art program.

In addition, the Museum showed The Great Northwest, which included a 70-minute video, photographs, and ephemera by Matt McCormick. The Great Northwest, according to McCormick is an “experimental documentary based on the re-creation of a 3,200 mile road-trip through the Pacific Northwest made in 1958 by four Seattle women who thoroughly documented their journey in an elaborate scrapbook… Fifty years later, Portland filmmaker Matt McCormick found their scrapbook in a thrift store, and in 2010 set out on the road, following their route as precisely as possible and searching out every stop in which the ladies had documented.”

Back to Past Exhibitions