Reciprocity
We are proud to present a group exhibition with artists Audrey Goldstein, Anne Lilly, Isabel Riley, and Deb Todd Wheeler – working with sculpture, technology, and interactive installation in relationship to space, time, intimate experiences, objects, and the self. The works in the exhibition particularly focus on the experience of empathy and the practice of exchanging things with others for mutual benefit.
Empathy has been described as the capacity to understand what another person is experiencing from within the other person's frame of reference, i.e., the capacity to place oneself in another's shoes. The sculptors in this exhibition work with materials in order to understand the immaterial and their relationship to them – resembling the essence of empathic interacting. These particular artists are engaged in work that embodies the subtle communication between each other, an exchange of the immaterial in order to gain strength and understanding. Like magnets pulling towards each other or repelling away – the constructed empathetic relationships between artist and artwork, artist and artist, artwork and artwork, and finally artwork and viewer are ever present and become the cycles of empathy within the curated space. The curious aspect of these relationships is reminiscent of technological singularity – what gets lost and gained in between each cycle?
The technological singularity (also, simply, the singularity) is the hypothesis that the invention of artificial superintelligence will abruptly trigger runaway technological growth, resulting in unfathomable changes to human civilization.
Neurological findings have confirmed our intuitive experience of the subtle body, the felt body and how we share our experiences. Somatic empathy, the physical reaction thought to be based on mirror neurons responses allows us to align and communicate our experiences much in the same way that these sculptures do. The German word "Einfuhlung", literally "feeling into" helps us to see this relationship more clearly.
“ the immortality of the thing is its finitude, not its eternity. What happens to identification at this point ? Who can we identify with? of course, identification is always with an image. But ask anybody whether they’d actually like to be a JPEG file. And this is precisely my point: if identification is to go anywhere, it has to be with this material aspect of the image, with the image as thing, not as representation. And then it perhaps ceases to be identification, and instead becomes participation. “ – Hito Steyerl, The Wretched On The Screen
Audrey Goldstein lives and works in the Boston area. Her work has been exhibited extensively including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, the Danforth Museum, Framingham, MA, and the Duxbery Art Complex Museum, Duxbery, MA. Her performance work was staged at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA, and at the D.U.M.B.O. Arts Festival through the D.U.M.B.O. Arts Center, Brooklyn, NY. She is a recipient of the Artist Resource Fund award from the Berkshire Taconic Trust, a Traveling Scholars award from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and the International Association of Art Critics Emerging Artist Award. She is represented by Gallery Kayafas where she installed her recent one-person exhibition, The Repair Reflex.
Kinetic sculptor Anne Lilly uses carefully engineered motion to manipulate our perceptions of time, place and self. Her interactive and meticulously constructed sculptures move in organic, fluid and mesmeric ways. Fabricated in machined metals, they involve the touch or participation of the viewer, pressing clinical qualities against the sensuous response of each piece. Lilly has received the Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation Grant Award for Lifetime Achievement, the the Blanche E. Colman Grant, visiting artist positions at the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Art Institute of Boston. Her work was included in a landmark 14-month exhibition of kinetic art at the MIT Museum, and her work has been collected by the DeCordova Museum, the New Britain Museum of American Art, the Middlebury College Museum of Art, and numerous corporate and private collections internationally. In March 2017, she was the invitational lecturer and guest critic at Lebanese American University, in Beirut, Lebanon. Lilly holds a Bachelor of Architecture, magna cum laude, from Virginia Tech, and has taught at MIT and Massachusetts College of Art. She is represented by Sponder Gallery in Boca Raton, FL; Rice/Polak Gallery in Provincetown, MA; and William Baczek Fine Art in Northampton, MA.
Isabel Riley lives and works in the Boston, MA. Her recent sculpture can be seen at Very Gallery, Boston, MA. Riley has a thriving scenic artist career and has a very active music career. Her work is in private collections in Boston, MA and beyond.
In Athens, Greece everywhere one looks there are fragments of ancient buildings at your feet. The architectural beauty of the past is broken, imperfect, scattered by God, the color gone, left still, absorbed and embedded into the present. In the subway stations there are displays of copious ceramic vessels and coins unearthed when the tracks were laid. Objects unaltered, picked up and presented as they were when they were found. These everyday relics lay in irreverent piles in homage to the civilization of the philosophers. Yet they are precious, enigmatic and iconic. This is the sediment of our daily lives. To some it is garbage, to others it is too beautiful to clean up. We can decide what is personal, what is autobiographical and what is the addition of the past and the present and the future.
Deb Todd Wheeler
Entrenched in the Boston area for the past several decades, the land of scientific advancement and historic lore, my work draws from this source to generate discreetly intimate experiences through performative objects, interactive installations, and participatory gatherings. Raised by musicians, and trained as a material craftsman, I have an interest in both antiquated and new technologies, and an attitudinal nimbleness that spawns collaboration across disciplines. In my studio, performative objects and experiences are generated in relation to the human body-- where time, material and interaction are required to explore issues of labor and manufacturing, and the effects of industry on the landscape. There is a clash between the desire to be productive, to be industrious, to push technology forward, and the fraught consequences this desire reaps: through the impact of waste, residue and other less visible costs of productivity. This clash, where hi meets lo, fuels my thinking, both sonically and visually. -Deb Todd Wheeler
Some recent exhibitions include LABspace (NY), Concord Art (MA), DeCordova Museum (MA), Miller Yezerski Gallery (MA), Institute of Contemporary Art (ME), The New Britain Museum of American Art (CT), the Islip Art Museum (NY), St Gaudens Museum (NH), as well as the Megapolis Audio Art and Documentary Festival (MA). Live performances with LENNY at Iceland Airwaves (Reykjavik, Iceland), Rockwood Music Hall (NYC), Lily Pad (MA). Awards include a LEF Contemporary Work Fund Artist grant in Inter-media, Massachusetts Cultural Council Grants in Sculpture and Installation, as well as Photography (Finalist), and New Genres (Finalist), the New England Journal of Aesthetic Research, Artist Resource Trust, and a collaborative project grant from Artists in Context. I am on the Graduate Faculty of the Lesley University College of Art and Design, and also teach in the 3D Department at Massachusetts College of Art and Design.