A reception is scheduled for 5-9 p.m. in the gallery. During that time, visitors are welcome to tour the entire Catapult facility, including the upstairs studios for Southeast Department of Art students.

Phillips and Bayan will give an artist talk about their exhibition at 6 p.m. April 22 in the Catapult classroom on the main floor. The exhibition is free and open to the public.

Catapult Creative House hours are Tuesday through Saturday 7:30 a.m.-4 p.m.

Phillips is an assistant professor of photography at Southeast. He received his Master of Fine Arts in visual studies from the State University of New York at Buffalo and his bachelors degree in photography from Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara, California. His work has been featured or is forthcoming on the covers of Creative Quarterly, The Big Muddy, The Cape Rock Review and the Cimarron Review. Bradley has exhibited his work nationwide, most notably at Art Space and CEPA Gallery in New York.

Bayan hails from the land of plaid long sleeve shirts, freshly roasted coffee and the type of trees that make every day feel like Christmas. She is a multimedia artist whose work focuses on the intimate relationships cultivated between people and technology. In 2010, she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in digital art from the University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon. After graduating, she worked as a professional letterpress printer for Oblation Papers & Press in Portland, Oregon, before moving to Buffalo, New York, for graduate school, where she received her Master of Fine Arts in emerging practices in 2015 from the State University of New York at Buffalo. She currently resides in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, where she is an instructor of photography and graphic design at Southeast.

The artists say Disrupt/Connect seeks to provide an alternative method for looking at a studio-based artistic practice by intentionally relocating artistic production outside of a conventional workspace — a common practice amongst contemporary artists working in New Media.

By placing an emphasis on a non-studio practice, the project allowed them, they say, to explore the intersections between community, technology and performance.

We are interested in challenging a contemporary artistic practice that resides only within a traditional studio space, thus promoting a collaborative approach to art production through considering the city and its inhabitants as our studio and collaborators.

This exhibit, they say, differs from art created in a studio-based practice. By nature, an artistic practice is a solitary endeavor, as it mainly resides inside an artists personal studio. This type of studio-based practice has historically dominated a cultural understanding of artistic production. Michelle Grabner, an American painter and conceptual artist, would describe this early emphasis on studio practice as a room of privilege through which discrete aspects of artistic competence [are]explored. This venerated space is lauded as being the site of creative genius, however, it exists by isolating the working artist from his surrounding environment.

Disrupt/Connect offers a different approach to the studio-based process, they say.

For more information, contact Leah Powers at lepowers@semo.edu or (573) 290-5372.