PROJECT ROOM F

“Because beauty repeatedly brings us face-to-face with our own powers to create, we know where and how to locate those powers when a situation of injustice calls on us to create…”

—Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just

Working at the intersections of beauty, justice, pleasure and pain, you’ve imbued meaning into richly varied mediums and mined your complex identities, both inherited and chosen. Eschewing didactic politics, your works are deeply nuanced and impassioned, intensely committed, unapologetically beautiful and at times fraught and painful. You’ve embraced the experiment and the experiential — and have been more ambitious than we could have imagined, especially given those first weeks as we peered through screens, framed by squares, wondering how to care for our practices and each other.

The philosopher Elaine Scarry says that when we come upon beautiful things, they act like small tears in the surface of the world that pull us through to some vaster space. You ruptured perceptions and pulled us through —collectively and as individuals — into a place that was gorgeous and raw, at times prickly, but always rigorous and ardent. You forged extreme beauty through photography, collage, mixed media, video, performance, printmaking, sculpture and painting. Through praxis, you raised your voices and centered your visions, challenging viewers to search for something beyond themselves and reconsider positions of power. You defied the shapes that confined us, your energy and commitment intensely pulsing through wires and across space. In quantum physics it’s called entanglement — interconnectedness, a shared state, community, humans, love.

—Ann Weathersby