Chase Munsey: BFA Artist Talk

Facilitated by Western Gallery intern Lav Phalon.

Artist Statement

Where is the line between permanence and performance? What is the difference between a self portrait and the self? "Internal Gestures" centers the relationship between physical experience, memory, and materiality, where the internal becomes visible through expression and form. Our physical reality is perceived through the body; touch, sight, and movement become our ways of knowing. Clay, as a medium, metaphorizes the act of being by holding gestures, interaction, and enduring time within its figure, affirming the body’s presence in history.

My body, like clay, is malleable—marked by time, sensation, and memories. Through direct engagement with the ceramic material, each impression becomes a tangible trace, a moment left behind in the undulating forms. Mirroring the body’s own process of becoming, the sculptures grow organically, coiling upward in fluid and unpredictable evolutions. Affected by conditions of their environment like plasticity and manipulation, the experience of change becomes visible and preserved in the kiln fired forms.

The images illuminate the process, emphasizing the performative and abstract nature of creation. The images extend the body by dissolving the identity of the maker, blurring authorship and reducing the maker to a presence and gesture. The unresolved forms fabricate a human familiarity, the low visual legibility suggests limbs, figures, a torso, hair. When projected onto cloth, the event remains operatic; still responsive to the space in which it exists, continuing the performance beyond the moment of making.

When the process and products of an embodied experience are placed in concert, that history becomes tangible and dynamic, open to interpretation through multiple ways of seeing.