| Brian Christensen’s sculpture headlines the Gallery East exhibit. |
“A View of Three,” an exhibition of sculpture and paintings by three Brigham Young University art professors, is the College of Eastern Utah’s latest Gallery East exhibit.
Featuring the works of Brian Christensen, Bryon Draper and Peter Everett, the exhibition is open weekdays Oct. 4-29 from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Gallery East is located in the northwest corner of the Student Activity Center.
“The show is sure to open a few new eyes to art and a few new hearts to what is happening currently in sculpture and painting in Utah,” Gallery East Director Brent Haddock stated. “We [the CEU art department] had a goal to focus at least one major exhibit on 3-D art and especially sculpture. I had met Brian Christensen through my son who is his neighbor. When I discovered that he was head of the sculpture program at BYU, an invitation to exhibit was extended. He graciously accepted the invitation and included two of his colleagues, Bryon Draper and Peter Everett.”
Christensen graduated from BYU in 1989 with a bachelor’s of arts degree. After graduation he attended graduate school at Washington University in St. Louis for his master’s of fine arts. He has been teaching at BYU since 1993 as an associate professor of sculpture.
“Christensen says he tends to work in two different ways. One is by purely dealing with the beauty and nature of the material he is working with. The other way deals with creating work through concepts, which is the type that makes up most of the current exhibit at Gallery East,” commented Haddock.
He also creates sculptures by reacting to objects that he finds. One of the pieces in the CEU exhibition is centered on a large sphere made out of solid rubber that one of his students found. On the rubber is the inscription “Lord Lastophere.” The strange name reminded Christensen of something demonic, so he made the rubber look like a large witch’s cauldron, explained Haddock.
Draper’s interest in ruins of antiquity collides with a modern sensibility in his sculptures of fragmented figures. Draper constructs forms interchanging cast bronze or steel fragments of figurative elements with texture blocks of cut stone using spatial alignment to tie the fragments together.
The exhibit is free and open to the public. It is made possible by the support from CEU, the Utah Arts Council, the Utah Office of Museum Services and the National Endowment for the Arts, Washington D.C.