Connective Tissue
By Geneviève Wallen
Lodged between Identity and Place, Connection offers soft renditions of the connective tissues interweaving human and non-human life. The artists in this section poetically translate profound and reverberating longings and desires. Connection as an exhibition provides latitude to the image galleries that precede and follow it; complicating the enmeshments we collectively tell about the making and understanding of personhood, belonging, and place-making.
What kind of stories can we harvest from photographs capturing a set of three hands dripping with mango juice, an elderly woman contemplatively holding a lotus bud, a single whittled white harebell in a collage, smooth rocks contouring bodies, firmly planted feet in a body of water, a quiet lotus pond, sunbeams softly embracing bodies, tumultuous oceanic waves, taped up dried leaves, a climbing indoor vine, and a butterfly with a partially broken wing? The selected works introduce a tale of entanglements and fragmentations, tracing intergenerational stories that span across the edge of an ocean to the intimacy of one’s home.
“What do you see when scrolling; what is absent; who is missing; what are the gaps and the in-betweens”
Organic elements punctuate the exhibition like commas and semicolons, gathering and accumulating information, while inviting more questions. What do you see when scrolling; what is absent; who is missing; what are the gaps and the in-betweens; how do you connect with the non-human life around you; how do you define kinship; what have you inherited, and what are you refusing? An agent of metaphors and an imagination lubricant, organic matter haunts our collective memoryscape. If one cannot place a memory or sensation, organic elements provide sites for projection. Declaration of selfhood and geographic connections are subtle, emerging out of shadows, peeking through an artwork’s title, pulled from a gaze or a posture.
Connection is transient state: it can be equally a carrier of appeasement and violence in the relationships foundational to our embodied and lived experiences. In the artworks in this section the outlines of our collective selves are blurred and partially delineated, highlighting the ephemerality and fragility of the connective thread interlocking others’ lives with our own.