The importance of not seeing clearly.

I am so thrilled to have been asked to participate in this exhibition. It features work by NYFA MARK Alumni: Lorrie Fredette, Dorene Quinn and yours truly and was curated by more alumni: Wilka Roig and Ruth Sproul.

It opened this last Friday at the Community Arts Partnership (CAP) ArtSpace in Center Ithaca, 171 E. State Street. Ithaca, and runs through the end of the month.

It's also garnered quite a bit of local media attention a review of the show can be found here, and an interview I gave can be found here.

Curators Roig and Sproul write:

"Why do we need to see things clearly? This compulsive need is perhaps not so much a desire for understanding as it is a need for appeasement, not so much an expression of our curiosity than of our anxiety.

This exhibit is intimately related to the artist´s wager against accepting one version of how things may be explained. It also presents the artist as obsessive researcher, observing, gathering, recording, reordering and reinterpreting; art-making as performance, as passage of time, as a reinterpretation of perception and experience; the art object as an encounter, a adaptative analysis and rendition of the obsessive need to control and understand, a reconstitution of the repetitive cycles of natural and cultural systems.

The artists featured in this composite exhibition have surrendered themselves fully to their questions and reactions through the materials and processes that facilitate each of their investigations, not of what is real, but of the resulting distortions.

In the attempt to reveal what is real, the real evades perception. The Importance of Not Seeing Clearly invites the viewer to accept this uncertainty without reservations, to give into the vertigo that is produced by what we do not understand. The works in this exhibition dare us to pause, delay, and rummage in perplexity itself, to connect that which we know with that which we feel, that which we think with that which we do, and to distrust explanations that satisfy our curiosity."

If you're in or near the Ithaca area, please, stop by and see the show!