“Parentheses” Exhibition
David Nolan Gallery
[Image: © Adrienne Hall "Pastoral Desire" (still), (2017)]
This event has ended.
University of Pennsylvania MFA exhibition curated by David Hartt and Sharon Hayes
David Nolan Gallery presents Parentheses, a group exhibition curated by David Hartt and Sharon Hayes, featuring the University of Pennsylvania’s 2018 MFA graduating class: Lauren Altman, Danièle Dennis, Junyuan Feng, Erlin Geffrard, Adrienne Hall, Jiayi Liu, Jiaqi Pan, Zoya Siddiqui, James Sprang, Heryk Tomassini, Kasey Toomey, Monika Uchiyama, Eric Yue.
This group exhibition is composed around an unintentional collective. In choosing to study in the same place, at the same time, these artists became, by default, a group. Each engaged their own intensive interrogations in the context of shared structures, overlapping and intersecting urgencies and unexpected events or happenings. (One of those, for this group, was the tumult of the 2016 US Presidential Election and its aftermaths.)
This constellation of their individual works does not propose a thematic concern, a unified material investigation, a set of animating theoretical foundations or, even, a mutual commitment to a particular futurity. So what does this exhibition offer in terms of a shared horizon of aesthetic practice?
In his introduction to Cruising Utopia, performance scholar and queer theorist José Muñoz steps off philosopher Ernst Bloch to offer “hope as a hermeneutic, and from the point of view of political struggles today, such a critical optic is nothing short of necessary in order to combat the force of political pessimism.”
The heterogeneous works of these 13 artists evidence singular urgencies and deep commitments. Their work and the seriousness of their endeavors gather as the kind of critical hopefulness that Muñoz proposes: hard and insistent works of resistance.
Media
Schedule
from June 28, 2018 to July 28, 2018
Opening Reception on 2018-06-28 from 18:00 to 20:00