Kendell Carter
,
Zoe Crosher
,
Michael Dee
,
Todd Gray
,
Sherin Guirguis
,
Ball Nogues
,
Eamon O'Kane
,
Ebony G. Patterson
,
Seth Kaufman
,
Yasmin Than
,
Keith Walsh
,
Augusta Wood
,
Brenna Youngblood
,
See Line Gallery presents a group exhibition From My Universe: Objects of Desire II, curated by Janet Levy featuring works by:
- Ball Nogues,
- Kendell Carter,
- Zoe Crosher,
- Michael Dee,
- Sherin Guiguis,
- Todd Gray,
- Seth Kaufman,
- Eamon O’Kane,
- Ebony G. Patterson,
- Yasmin Than,
- Keith Walsh,
- Augusta Wood, Brenda Youngblood
The individual perspective is often confused as an all-encompassing view of the world or universe at large. Because the individual perspective is the only medium in which we can access the world, humankind has developed the subconscious notion of “my universe,” which is shaped from each individual’s experience, used as a convention in order to make sense of the otherwise chaotic stimulus that the greater universe harbors.
Among the myriad of experiences within each individual universe, there is a place for the natural human phenomenon of desire. This ineffable emotion has manifested itself in a number of ways, including their materialization in objects. These objects of desire, as subjective as their origins may be, are a physical representation of an often-incommunicable experience, which translates these subjective sentiments into broadly understandable terms. Where words fail to express, objects perform the task of communicating these desires that represent this lusty emotion figuratively, symbolically, and even literally, offering insight into the minds of the individuals who desire them.
In the words of Georges Bataille in his work, The object of Desire and the Totality of the Real: It is painful to dwell on the inadequacy of a description, necessarily awkward and literary, whose final meaning refers to the denial of any distinct meaning. We can keep this much in mind: that in the embrace the object of desire is always the totality of being, just as it is the object of religion or art, the totality in which we lose ourselves insofar as we take ourselves for a strictly separate entity (for the pure abstraction that the isolated individual is, or thinks he is). In a word, the object of desire is the universe, in the form of she who in the embrace is its mirror, where we ourselves are reflected. At the most intense moment of fusion, the pure blaze of light, like a sudden flash, illuminates the immense field of possibility, on which these lovers are subtilized, annihilated, submissive in their excitement to a rarefaction which they desired.
From Bataille’s notion that the object of desire is the universe, it follows then that the subjective experience of the universe is a portion of, and interacts directly with everything else, including the plurality of universes devised by each individual, which in turn blurs the distinction between “my universe” and the universe in its totality.