“Beside Myself” Exhibition

JTT

[Image: Nancy Youdelman "Various Bonnets" (1972-74) Photo: Michael Kariban]

This event has ended.

Curated by Dan Herschlein

“…it makes us feel that it should not exist, or at least that it should not exist here. Yet if the object or entity is here, then the categories which we have up until now used to make sense of the world cannot be valid. The weird thing is not wrong, after all: it is our conceptions that must be inadequate.”

- Mark Fisher, The Weird and The Eerie

“My intention with this exhibition is to present different ways in which the narrative and the handmade can be used to refute the projection of culturally sanctioned ideals, and reveal the damaging effects that can occur when an individual either cannot or will not psychically incorporate those ideals into their personal sense of self. As Kaja Silverman describes in her book ‘The Threshold of the Visible World,’ one’s ability to identify with a culture’s image-ideal allows them the feeling of having a Coherent Ego or the sense of a Moi. She refers to this complicated process of rejection and self-reinforcement as ‘the principle of the self-same body,’ which, in its patriarchal mode of operation, includes reading lack and absence into anything dissimilar to itself. The sense of Moi ‘maintains itself by repudiating whatever it cannot swallow—by refusing to live in and through alien corporealities.’ But suppose that Moi could become double or triple, shared between bodies and through physical and emotional contradictions? What if we could learn to value and identify the fractured ego, the complicated and confused, the body in bits and pieces? Silverman suggests that the solution relies on the proliferation of more images, more texts—that it is the job of artists to flood the visual plane with various and complicated bodies, histories and personalities.

“Through their very gothic and physical imagery of mutation, fragmentation, disintegration and masquerade, the works in “Beside Myself” position themselves as objects in opposition to the self-same body; by presenting themselves as its shadow. I believe that the works in this show demonstrate the ways in which art maintains not just the historical but also the magical ability to conceive of expansive and malleable identities in the midst of all those that society and culture prescribe.”

- Dan Herschlein