Exit Gallery: A fresh coat of understanding

In a single rectangular room, art and ideas collide to create a space that confronts profound modern issues and concepts. This space is the Exit Gallery, which features a diverse array of artwork to engage the community in exploring contemporary art.

Located in SUB 212, the Exit Gallery is organized by the Office of Student Engagement, which uses a jurying process to select professional installments from a pool of student, faculty and alumni applicants. The deliberation narrows the applications down to eight impactful displays each year, split between fall and spring semesters.

“The purpose of the Exit Gallery is to sort of put the conversation about art and what we define as art and art that tackles all sorts of issues in social, economic and sociological factors head on,” said senior Steve Quinn, a gallery attendant.

After every exhibit, employees coat the room’s walls with a fresh coat of paint. These employees accommodate a seemingly endless variety of potential installment elements in the Exit Gallery in order to facilitate the exchange of concepts from artist to viewer. For example, “Taking up Space,” a body of work by Katie Meyer commenting on the perception of women in society, employed objects rolling around the floor. Other artists rejected walls and chose to suspend work from the ceiling.

Regardless of the form of delivery, the unique perspective of the artist impacts every audience member differently. Senior Mirandi Bakken, Director of ASMSU Arts and Exhibits, derives meaning from the displays through her degree in Anthropology. “Art is something that is really important to how we perceive the development and history of humans, especially in relation to their cognition,” said Bakken. “I think it's really awesome to continue to see that manifest in contemporary art.”

Each semester, the Exit Gallery welcomes a visiting artist to expand opportunities for students to immerse themselves in professional work and consider different technical and conceptual elements of the craft. Visiting artist Shakti Kroopkin’s “Beings in Time,” in the gallery until March 13, incorporates sumi ink and oil pieces from her abstract work, which emphasizes the nature of creative expression.

“I think that my work brings about a sense of freedom and that’s really what I hope to talk about is freedom – in your expression and freedom in what you choose to do for a living with your imagination and how that plays out,” Kroopkin said.

Inspiration for the spaces displayed in the gallery comes from the landscapes of Kroopkin’s Chicago hometown as well as her current home in New Mexico. Her abstract work began in 1996, and she has continued to develop it ever since.

“I think now that I’ve been creating what I consider to be my own language of abstraction, it’s almost like I’m going back to this same place. It’s my own creative imaginary world that I’m going into with my paintings and it’s more known now than it was before,” Kroopkin said. “When I started in abstraction I was doing a lot of experimenting with different types of mark-making and different symbols and I feel like I’ve kind of honed in on my voice. That took a lot of years to really develop and understand my voice as an artist and the world that I want to bring out.”

The “Beings in Time” installation was brought to the Exit Gallery in partnership with members of the Painting and Drawing Guild of MSU, who met Kroopkin at an art festival in Santa Fe. “I know that she talks about wanting to inspire people and I think she does have a really fun, whimsical style that could bring kind of a positive look on the arts and a positive look on just life in general,” Skylar Martinell, president of the Guild, said. “She’s just fun and it’s very vibrant so I hope that it brings a little bit of that into everybody’s day.”

The exhibit is unique to MSU because it is the first time the artist has focused on displaying the “winged ones”, “fantastical beings” that occur in her work. She hopes to provide students, as well as the rest of her audience, the opportunity to delve into her abstract world.

“This one woman looked at my paintings and she was like ‘mmm, this makes me feel like I feel after I eat the most amazing plate of pancakes.’ I’ve heard everything under the sun,” Kroopkin said. “I think it’s inspiring when people get it and when they can let their minds go and feel open to share with me what they see and feel and experience in the work. I like when people can be exploratory with it.”

The Exit Gallery will host a reception for Kroopkin on Monday, March 9 from 5 p.m. - 7 p.m., as it does with each installation, to provide a chance to interact with the artist and engage with a community of people invested in the space.

“I think in general, a lot of the shows that come through here just really express the amazing things that we can portray with art,” Mirandi Bakken said. “So much can be said without actually speaking.”