Arts This Week: Ruffin Gallery’s Echoes of the Shadows
By Ben Larsen
Ben Larsen:
The Ruffin Art Gallery graduation exhibition is open until June 6th. The exhibition is a collection of student works curated by two of the department’s graduate students. For Arts This Week, we spoke with Elena Yu Ganiyu Jimoh and Elnaz Latifpour.
Elena Yu:
I’m Elena Yu and I’m the Ruffin gallery manager here in the Department of Art. So this show, which we call the graduation show, is an annual tradition that’s been going on for a handful of years, where we invite PhD students from the Department of Art to apply to be co-curators and have oftentimes their first experience curating an art exhibition. We call it the graduation show because the exhibition opens directly after the Department of Art graduation every year, and so it’s an opportunity for our studio art students families to see their artwork and celebrate with them. So the opening reception happened on May 17th, and it acted as a reception for our department graduation as well.
Elnaz Latifpour:
My name is Elnaz Latifpour, and I’m a fourth year PhD student at the University of Virginia, and I’m studying the history of textiles and weaving and carpets from Southern Iran, and I’m here curating as a co-curator for this exhibition.
Ganiyu Jimoh:
My name is Ganiyu Jimoh, popularly known as Jimga. I’m an artist or a political cartoonist in Nigeria for a very long period before I came here in 2021. So, I’m a PhD candidate going into my fifth year, and my research is on modern and contemporary African art, with focus on digital arts from West Africa, specifically from Nigeria in the 90s. I and Elnaz, you know, selected, as a Ruffin co-creators for this particular show.
Elnaz Latifpour:
So, Jimga and I, after seeing all these works, which was a lot, we decided to define a theme for the exhibition, the final exhibition, and we talked a lot and came up with the title, which is “Echoes of the Shadows.”
Ganiyu Jimoh:
It was a kind of long, short and intense, you know, process, because we had to look at all the exhibitions, and at the end of the day, we’re able to like come up with a kind of unifying theme, because that’s another ethic, you know, you had lots of works that are expressing different forms of, you know, personal, societal, political, different ideas, you know, so and as co-curators, we have to like come up with a kind of unifying themes that could bring all these things together. So, and we’re able to, like, see this theme of memories, something that is reoccurring, something like that is looking, you know, behind the minds of all these artists. So at the end of the day, we came up with, you know, shadows, you know, something is actually hiding in the shadows. You know, something that the shadows could also help to express. You know, which lights may not be able to express? You know, if you will.
Elnaz Latifpour:
All of these works are kind of grappling with something which is not present, and grappling with something which is under the surface. And, yeah, all of them are kind of works about which something is not here, which is absence. The exhibition is until this Friday, June 6th. And I hope that other people also come and to see these beautiful works.
Ganiyu Jimoh:
I also want to add that the works on display, you know, they cut across different, you know, media of expression. We have paintings, installations. We also have digital arts. And all these works speak to the theme.
Ben Larsen:
The final day of the exhibition is, June 6th. More information about the gallery and its initiatives can be found on arts.as.virginia.edu. Arts This Week is supported by the UVA Arts Council and Piedmont Virginia Community College. PVCC Arts presents a rich array of dance music, theater and visual arts programming. Learn more@pvcc.edu
