APART/TOGETHER
Embrace the world through art with friends
ABOUT APART/ TOGETHER
How we brought Danielle Klebes and Hu Bei together
Danielle's Life-size Panels
Hu Bei's Sky Mask
Danielle's Life-size Panels
Friendship transcends time and space, allowing us to be present with the ones we love even from a distance. During the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic, graduate students from Visitor-Centered Exhibition Class at Florida State University co-curated the exhibition Apart/Together, supporting visitors to appreciate friendship in their lives.
The exhibition showcases the artworks of two artists, Danielle Klebes and Hu Bei, from the US and China respectively. Danielle utilized a "cool, bright, and unnatural color" (Klebes, 2018) to depict the joys and lows in her and her friends’ lives. She also created many life-size cut out paintings of her real friends and traveled with these wooden panels by her side. Hu Bei explored the intersection of cultures, languages, time, and space through multimedia. She made her Sky project a place where people from different places can share their voices and feel connected.
Danielle interpreted identity while Hu Bei emphasized unity. Through different media, both artists addressed the meaning of friendship and highlighted that friendship endures and brings people together when we cannot physically be together.
The exhibition aims to construct a special meaning during a special time for people to cherish their special ones in their lives. During the challenging time of Covid-19, people miss their friends and have to be physically apart from them. The curatorial team hope this exhibition could be a way to bring people together, inspire them to find connection with their loved ones, and get through this hard time.
The exhibition is supported by the Florida State University Museum of Fine Arts (MoFA), and curated by Brooke Wessel, Xiaonan Jiang, Zida Wang, Yawei Xiao, Xiaowei Zuo, and Adam Festor. The exhibition team would like to acknowledge Dr. Ann Rowson Love, Meredith Lynn, Annie Booth for their guidance and support during the exhibition’s development. We would also like to thank our contributing artists Hu Bei and Danielle Klebes.
References:
Danielle Klebes Artwork. (2018). Retrieved October 08, 2020, from http://www.danielleklebes.com/
OUR ARTISTS
Hu Bei & Danielle Klebes
HU BEI
“I see myself as a conceptual thinker as well as an active designer that constructs meaning in social and cultural context through design thinking and art. I enjoy working with multiple media, including graphics, typography, illustration, moving images, audio, digital media, and physical objects. Growing up in cosmopolitan Beijing has significantly influenced my design and art projects, which are mostly cross-cultural. What I am interested in exploring conceptually is the intersection of cultures, languages, time, and space. As for me, the process of making provides me the freedom to connect with people from different places. I desire my work to be a place where people could freely share one’s voice and feel connected.”
In 2018, Hu Bei created Our Sky Project by collecting pictures of the sky from her friends in18 countries and regions around the world, highlighting the cultural resonance that we can be together while apart under one sky.
DANIELLE KLEBES
“Change is persistent but can be almost imperceptible in mundane, anti-climactic moments. Time is usually discerned through change, so these uneventful moments transcend time with their insignificance. Units of time have set definitions, but, in reality, blocks of time hold very different weights depending on what transpires. Moments of uneventfulness become filler time, unnecessary to include in the story, but still how we spend the majority of our lives. Painting mundane scenes is an attempt to document unnoticed time.”
Danielle Klebes has her exhibitions at notable galleries and museums across the United States. Her work explores and disrupts ideas of social expectations and gender norms, including oil paintings on canvas and a series of life-sized freestanding wooden cutouts of her friends.