May 27 – June 19, 2016
Friday, May 27 – Opening reception
Artists:
Terry Berlier
Kate Bonner
Pablo Guardiola
Zane Jefferson Morris
Genevieve Quick
Sean Talley
Curated by Jasmin Lim
The mesocosm is the realm that we, as humans, are able to perceive with our senses. From our perspective, we are in the meso, the middle. The human scale appears to be between the outermost micro and macro scales—from subatomic particles like quarks and neutrinos to the universe or multiverse. While orienting from this position, we also create and use tools, both material and imagined, experiential and theoretical, to access scales many orders of magnitude smaller and larger.
How do we construct conceptions of the world around us? Adult consciousness tends to be focused like a spotlight, automatically making assumptions about the periphery and filling in the blanks. As a species thought to be capable of complex self-awareness, long-term planning and the ability to override impulses, why is it useful to understand perceptual processes that are normally subconscious? In some ways, impulse control plays a large role in the evolution of our species, of being able to consciously shape the world around us, but many of our day-to-day activities occur on autopilot. In the Rebecca Solnit essay, “Woolf’s Darkness: Embracing the Inexplicable,” she advises “to travel light when it comes to preconception” and to enter the darkness “with [our] eyes open.” Woolf’s “Darkness”—or the “Inexplicable”— is a zone of ambiguity, a liminal space where ideology and consciousness can shift and expand.
