Humorous, humerus, humorous: faculty art exhibition

By Sadie Hagberg

Adjunct art professor Jake Urbanski knew he wanted to do something different for the spring exhibition at UMW’s duPont gallery.

His exhibition, humorous humerus humorous, opened last Thursday. It is a display of  20 drawings with a common theme

With an M.F.A. and B.F.A. in photography, the ink and paper drawings allowed Urbanski to step away from medium he usually works with.

“It is a departure from my normal body of work,” Urbanski said.

Each of the 20 drawings, all untitled, are based around an aspect of a joke.

“Some are jokes that I like and some I researched,” he said.

Some drawings represent commonly known jokes and others are more obscure.  And a few drawings represent more than one joke.

Because the works are untitled, Urbanski believes that people will be able to interpret the work in their own way.

Urbanski’s hope for the exhibition was for people to exchange a few jokes and to look at art differently. He wanted people to think of and talk about art beyond the work’s physical nature.

Urbanski says that he wanted his art process to be fun. “I don’t like the idea of art being labor.”

He chose to do a project of this nature because he felt that it was right at this time.

“With the current social, political, economic situation, it seemed right to work on paper,” he said.

After settling on ink and paper as his medium, the idea of the joke came afterward.

In his artist statement, Urbanski said, “Although specific jokes were used for inspiration, the simplicity and sparsity of the illustrations combined commonly repeated elements in joke telling, offer multiple interpretations as to reference.  Please enjoy sharing your interpretations.”

The exhibition is open until January 29 in the duPont Gallery.