Incubation Series Exhibition Opening, "Rear Window"

Incubation Series Exhibition Opening, "Rear Window"

Perspective, wrote the critic John Berger, arranges the visible world before the gaze of a single spectator. The visible world is composed not only of objects, but of the relations between and among viewers: relations that define subjects and objects, establish structures of power and exchange, and situate groups and affiliations. "Rear Window" presents lens-based, sculptural, and installation work by a group of five artists whose practices reveal the dynamic tension between vision and perception and how this dynamism produces and transforms the external world.

Drawing from both contemporary and historical understandings of observation, the artists in "Rear Window" deploy still and moving image, new media technology, and sculpture to blur the boundaries between self and other, subject and object, and voyeurism and surveillance. From the particular vantage points of Austin Fisher, David Johnson, Jessi Ali Lin, Rebecca Naegele, and Emmanuela Soria Ruiz emerge new ways of understanding the formation of subcultures within music fanbases; new modes of animating matter; trenchant critiques of the sexualized gaze; and strategies for resisting the ever- persistent scrutiny of surveillance capitalism. In these films, sculptures, and photographs, the techniques of the observer are tested and recalibrated.

"Rear Window" is the fifteenth exhibition in the Incubation Series, a student-led initiative that fosters new ways of making, exhibiting, and seeing art. This exhibition is curated by Lauren Downing and Tausif Noor.

The Incubation Series is made possible by the generous support of The Sachs Program for Arts Innovation, the Department of Art History, School of Arts and Sciences, and the Department of Fine Arts, Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania.

Exhibition runs February 15 – March 15, 2020
Gallery Hours: Saturday 2PM-6PM and by appointment

Click HERE for the press release.