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Consider a Disappearance
Ruby Que at UIS Visual Arts Gallery
The University of Illinois Springfield Visual Arts Gallery
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These Spaces Hold Us pivots around the fulcrum of care, paying close attention to the journeys and mediations that happen between ideas and their material manifestations. Taking grief as a shared experience and healing as a shared desire, the exhibition asks what it means to be held and how artists can create spaces that hold us.
Across the artworks in Spaces, there is sincerity mixed with cynicism about the potential of healing from the violence of our contemporary landscape. Reading them through the lens of alienation caused by capitalism allows the different threads of these works to form the knit of a tightly layered narrative.
Grief, care, translation, violence and labor rub up against one another in a texture of meanings that ask the audience to coalesce around their points of commonality while simultaneously contemplating their own profound isolation. A pool becomes a vessel for letting go of grief, pallets morph into love poems for forgotten and marginalized communities and workout stations signpost futile performances of labor.
While the artists approach the spectrum along which care and grief emerge from divergent positions, each is committed to upending narratives we have inherited and co-constructed. They each accept our complicity in them as locations from which we might begin to let go of harmful structures, together.
