DISCIPULUS 2024 features exemplary works created by the emerging young talent of the Golden West College (GWC) Art Department. The exhibition celebrates the creativity of these student artists and the whole of the GWC Art community that fosters their talent. In our current age, with more and more of our daily experiences mediated by social apps, live-streaming, watch parties, virtual meetups, cloud-sharing, VR, AR, and AI, it seems that nearly all of our life is bending toward these immaterial, digitized streams of data that flow through the ether into virtual and artificial worlds anchored in the cloud. Within this context, artists who revel in tactile studio practices and physical object-making are engaged in a certain counter-cultural protest movement – pushing against the virtual, artificial, and digitized, to confidently reclaim the unique value of our physicality and embodied experience.

This is the collective work of GWC Art: celebrating attentiveness to the material substance of the world, the physicality of the places we inhabit, and the opportunity to be truly present to one another; working to rediscover the significance of seeing things “in the flesh” — unmediated by our laptops, tablets, and camera phones; and pushing forward to share of our unique embodied perspective through ink and paper, paint and canvas, fire and clay. Despite the wide variety of media represented in the exhibition, both formal and thematic connections emerge to form a dynamic visual dialog. Viewed collectively, the work testifies to a vibrant academic art community actively engaged in contemporary cultural explorations from the classroom to the studio and the gallery.

This juried exhibition was open to submissions from all current students of the GWC Art Department, including those studying ceramics, design, drawing, painting, photography, printmaking, and sculpture. Artwork selections and awards were decided by a committee of GWC Art Department faculty and Guest Curator Jeff Rau.