June 1 – June 23, 2024
Opening Reception, Friday, June 7 from 6-8 pm
This is how the conversation started: “The world is made of two forces that can only be named in relation to one another.”
And of course, someone brought up the Tao Te Ching…
which begins:
The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and Earth.
This led to further exchange about how language and visual arts shadow each other. While language is often a practical or perlocutionary agent, as the great language surgeon Jürgen Habermas labeled it, when it is expressive and persuasive (illocutionary) it relies on a set of oppositions such as: rule/exceptional; norm/aberration; restriction/permission that bears fruit in the visual universe as well. We decided that the coincidence between art and language was more than happenstance; it was analogous, possibly even elemental.
As the framework firmed up, our conversation became more fluid, organic, and naughty. Someone proposed an idea for an exhibition: “Sore thumbs!!!” as in sticking out like sore thumbs.
“The best stuff sticks out in just the right wrong way,” she said.
“Then it needs another layer of unamability so it’s a sore thumb of sore thumbs.”
“Sword Thumbs?”
“Like Edward Scissorhands?”
Which was funny, because the character was a sore thumb. A disruption. A deviant. A misfit. But in the most graceful and organic way.
We had put down the brushes and were painting with words at this point.
“Sword Thumbs” features thirteen artists whose work subverts, destabilizes, disrupts, and surprises with a deceptively simple set of oppositional forces that give rise to universes of excited possibilities.
