PROJECT ROOM E

​​We: are (untranslatable)

This group of visual artists came together in the Fall, an unformed community bursting with possibility and ambition. They soon created an ecosystem where various facets of investigation began to coalesce as they disrupted conceptions of identity and experience. Through inquiry, committed critique, vulnerability, and moxie, they pushed themselves and each other to become more rigorous makers and thinkers. 

They are storytellers at heart, and what unified them from the beginning was their commitment to care for and make more visible not only their secret selves, but also those who came before and helped form them—funneled through the lenses of very individual, idiosyncratic practices. They utilize photography, video, sculpture, painting, collage, performance, and text to draw lines in the sand and stake claims to subjectivity and materiality. With these varied and rich practices, they question and subvert notions about joy, the corporeal body, gender expression, gender constructs, sexual expression, the imperfection of memory, familial constructs, trauma, the ramifications of colonialism, artifice, youth culture, grief, and fantasy.

These artists are complex weavers of histories, truths, fictions, and ambiguities. The originator of this essay’s title, the Algerian-born French writer Hélène Cixous, comes to mind when she states, “Our own subjective singularities are in truth composed, on the one hand, of many other near or distant humans, we are carriers of previous generations, we are, without knowing it, heirs, caretakers, witnesses of known or unknown ancestors; on the other hand we are full of others originating from the books we have read.”

– Ann Weathersby