“With Pleasure 2019 ICP-Bard MFA” Exhibition

Baxter Street/ the Camera Club of NY

[Image: Samantha Box "Untitled (The Kiki Scene)" (2017)]

This event has ended.

Curated by Lily Mott
With Pleasure is an exhibition of new works by the MFA 2019 graduates from the International Center of Photography-Bard College MFA program in Advanced Photographic Studies, curated by Lily Mott.

The body is a site: of memory and loss, exploration and evidence, trauma and reckoning, fantasy and substance, the public and the private, conflict and reconciliation, of representation and figuration. The body needn’t be always human, or even living. It can be an idea, a fleeting feeling, a crack in the rocks, cool water, the layering of physical and nonphysical selves. How do we engage with these concepts? If the body is the “flesh metaphor of all human experience”1, when does the body transcend its fragmented nature to become a whole: body to heart, heart to whole, whole to community?

In gathering together the work of 10 fiercely singular artists, themselves bound together as a body through their experience as the ICP-Bard MFA class of 2019, With Pleasure embraces, rather than denies, the body’s fractured nature. Through examining and reveling in the possibilities inherent in these disparate views of the body, these fragments, when placed in proximity, become facets of a whole, of a collective world-view, rather than pieces of experience without connection.

Having spent the past two years in academic, artistic, emotional and physical closeness, With Pleasure marks the finale of this cohort’s time together. As our futures fragment, each artist will manifest their individual visions of the body, of bones, flesh, organ, a vessel through which life is mediated, a site of questions and answers.

1. From The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch, 2011.