Bewilderment, Art Exhibition with Pegah Bahador, Patrick McGuan and Daisy Wiley

Sep 9, 2025 12:00pm-Oct 10, 2025 5:00pm

KOA Art Gallery, Blaisdell Hall

Opening Reception: September 9, 2025, Noon
Free

Artists Pegah Bahador, Daisy Wiley, and Patrick McGuan explore themes of place, landscape, and dislocation mediated by grief and translation.

Artist Bios: 
Pegah Bahador (b. 1998, Tehran) practices doori o doosti, a Farsi term that translates literally to “distance and friendship,” and emphasizes how the two coexist and (even sonically) intertwine. This epistolary practice resembles letters or is itself a type of correspondence between them and their subjects. They work between language, drawing, and video making as traces of perception to focus on place and language dislocation, and the gradual deterioration and loss of opacity and information that follows it.

Patrick McGuan was baptized in a ship’s bell and has spent much of life drifting around the Midwest. They work between sculpture, performance, and experimental writing to explore the ways language is grafted onto bodies and landscapes, the connections between labor and ecological history, visionary and devotional art, and the confusions of incarnation. Patrick taught at Syracuse University for four years and currently serves as assistant professor of sculpture at Hastings College in Hastings, Nebraska.

Daisy Wiley was raised between the suburban sprawl of DC bureaucrats, DIY punk houses, and the ancient mountains and agrarian lands of Virginia. Her research is driven by political ecology, public memory studies, speculative fiction, and her organizing experiences around tenancy and land use. Daisy works between installation, sculpture, and printmaking to unearth mythologies embedded in landscape, explore the space between place and its representations, and consider how collapse and illegibility can also contain the possibility of radical transformation.