October 30 2015 - January 17, 2016

Curatorial Statement: The experience of an image is a creative act of integration¹. Every image and object we make is composed of all of the images and objects we encounter, perceive and imagine.

Through this selection of work, we address ways of seeing and translation — drawings, photographs, collages, paintings, surfaces, renderings, sculptures. Each piece is at once a material and a document of active research, representation and reflection. Each inhabit various states of resolution.

Image Landscapes is an array of work that activate vision. How is an image seen and read when it is in close proximity to another image or object? How do the images and objects we make speak with one another? In what ways do images, originating from different hands and purposes, resonate with or present one another? With these questions in mind, this exhibition takes landscape as a metaphor, and seeks to make visible the lines of inquiry and language between works. The work is strengthened in relation, bringing about conversations between multiple pieces and within each piece. Each of these conversations engender new readings of meaning and form.

This exhibition attempts to become a place. In reconsidering the activity and role of this particular gallery space, the exhibition proposes that these works are still alive — as active objects, that are continuously activated by one another across the space. They are not displayed as artifacts, but shown as living segments of our practices. Image Landscapes orients the selections in such a way that they overlay one another, giving occasion for new associations. These composite collections generate images and meanings, reveal new junctions between objects, and pose new readings in which we are at once contributing, forming and perceiving.

Throughout the months of November and December 2015, a series of informal conversations in the Gelman Gallery offer opportunities for intimate roundtables and shared dialogue, bringing attention to interdisciplinarity and concurrent research in art, design and architecture.

— Lisa J. Maione MFA 16 GD, and Elizabeth Leeper MFA 17 GD, co-curators (1) From Gyorgy Kepes, in The Language of Vision