Reception for PennDesign MFA Exhibition at David Nolan Gallery

It is an unstated reality that our work as artists is most often seen in group exhibitions, amongst and in conversation with other artists’ work in a space with a distinct authorship and authority, under the rubric of a curatorial proposal. Of the experience of installing for a group show, a respected artist once advised younger practitioners, “Arrive first and place your work. And make what you bring is heavier than any other work in  the show so no one will want to move it.” Clearly, the navigation of this situation can be riddled with anxiety and competition and demands a negotiation, a reckoning of sorts, with the structural condition of aesthetic practice–that, despite all mythologies to the contrary, our work is not autonomous.

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?