A new exhibition opening this week at University Galleries will be familiar to some.
Artist Jen Bervin’s Shift Rotate Reflect was there just five years ago, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Bervin and Kendra Paitz, director and chief curator at University Galleries, mutually agreed to bring the show back for people to experience in person.
“This space has a familiarity to me now,” Bervin said this week while installing the show. Each of the gallery’s four rooms was in the thick of preparations, which drills buzzing, lifts beeping and paint still drying. In place of University Galleries' crisp, white walls that typically greet guests as they walk in, accent walls are painted in black and navy, lowering the color temperature and creating almost a hug of cocoon-like saturation.
As in 2020, Shift Rotate Reflect was designed for a long stay, remaining at University Galleries into December with a robust slate of public and educational programming associated with the show. The 2020 version was Bervin’s first career survey and book. The 2025 edition is neither wholly new, nor a duplication—in essence, Bervin has shifted, rotated and reflected on it.
“There’s something so magical about being able to make even better decisions the second time around—and to know that people will get to see the work this time,” she said. “It gave us a lot of room to play. There is a dozen new works in this show that kind of slide in under the radar. There’s a sense of renewal. And there’s also a sense of, for me, what this show did.”
Asked “what it did,” Bervin deferred to Paitz.
“I think it’s so exciting to have the opportunity to really realize ideas,” Paitz said. “We were constantly adapting with the former exhibition, but we still went ahead with it because it felt really urgent and important to share the work at that time.”
Paitz said those who experienced Shift Rotate Reflect digitally felt drawn and connected to it, but its extraordinary range of materials and scales is best seen in real life. The largest piece is 230 curvilinear feet, taking up an entire room. The smallest must be viewed through a microscope.
Bervin has a tenacity and stick-to-itiveness even the most meticulous artists might find impossible. River is a hand-stitched, silver-sequined rendering of the Mississippi River from top to tail that took her 12 years to make.
“We’re seeing this single body of water that has so many different histories, and connects and divides us in infinite ways,” Paitz said. “We’re in a state that’s bordered by the river, of course; most people here have some sort of relationship with it. So, there’s an automatic entry point we can start with.”
Some areas appear to be the work of a biologist; others employ handicrafts like quilting and embroidery. Bervin uses her own poetry, and that of others (Claudia Rankine and Emily Dickenson among them), as both a starting point to jump from—and their innards.
The centerpiece, if one must choose one, is Su Hui’s Picture of the Turning Sphere, a collaboration with Charlotte Lagarde combining film and textiles stemming from a 4th century reversible Chinese poem. The five-channel installation debuted in the 2020 edition and has thus far only been shown in Normal.
“I think the language-ing that’s happened in art around ‘pulling’ from others or appropriation—those words are often what people reach for,” Bervin said. “But what I’m reaching for is relation.”
Zoom out, and Shift Rotate Reflect is not at all a solo survey exhibition.
“Poetry is not written by one person. It’s written in a way that is very interrelated to our families, to our daily lives, to what we’ve read, to what we’re listening to,” said Bervin. “One of the things that draws me to this space [University Galleries] are the people and the ways in which Kendra Paitz has a way of holding artists that many curators don’t and holding her community in a way that many curators don’t.”
“I don’t know that many curators who are capable of taking such crazy risks,” Bervin said. “I would be hard pressed to think of someone who with confidence would suggest doing the same show twice—and to be right.”
Shift Rotate Reflect runs Aug. 15 – Dec. 10 at University Galleries, 11 Uptown Circle, Normal. An opening reception takes place Friday from 4-6 p.m. For a full list of public programs associated with the exhibition, visit galleries.illinoisstate.edu.
