Exhibition Labyrinths of the Mind Explores Encounters of Art, Psychology, and Neuroscience
This group show features the work of: Nancy Azara, Ford Crull, Greg Dunn, Jane Fine, Owen Gray, Nene Humphrey, Suejin Jo, Zachary Keeting, Ellen K. Levy, Sam Messenger, Paula Overbay, Pema Rinzin, David Scher, Barbara Takenaga, Dannielle Tegeder, and Sarah Walker.
Byrdcliffe Kleinert James Center for the Arts
36 Tinker Street, Woodstock NY
May 17 — June 30, 2019
Saturday, May 18: Dialogue with the Artists: Processes of Mind and Art, 3:00 to 4:00 pm followed by an Opening Reception, 4:00 to 6:00 pm.
Opening to the public on Friday, May 17, the Kleinert/James Center for the Arts presents the exhibition Labyrinths of the Mind. On Saturday, May 18, there will be a public discussion with the artists and curator at 3:00 pm on Processes of Mind and Art, followed by a reception until 6:00 pm.
The exhibition’s curator, Sara Lynn Henry, notes in a statement: “Where have our minds gone these days? Are they lost in the cascade of media, digital messages, and commercial/political fractured (fake?) realities that inundate us of late? The artists participating in Labyrinths of the Mind have set out to get beneath this cultural surface to explore the inner caverns of the personal mind.” Here, she says, the use of the word “mind” is intended to characterize the artist’s own cognition, thoughts, feelings, and creative moments—a stream of art-consciousness, so to speak. This inner world is explored for its own sake, but also explored for inner responses to the outer—nature, culture, even politics. This creative dance is impelled by the hearty remnants of psychologizing in our culture—i.e. what do I think—but also by the awareness of the rock bed of mind in the neurostructure and dynamics of the brain. In the last decade, advanced technologies have allowed for more to be learned about the brain than in all previous centuries. Some of the artists in Labyrinths of the Mind look directly to these neuroscientific forms as subject and metaphor in their art; others have been directly or subliminally affected by this new knowledge. All of the artists selected for the show create networks of visual events, dynamically interacting across open spaces—a stream of images, remembrances, bits of nature, sometimes scientific diagrams or imaging—all within the vast spaces of a mind experience. The recent understanding of the way our mind/brain structures meaning out of disparate bits of information, stored in various locations, has impelled this creative direction. A few artists penetrate to the unnamed space within which all occurs for a place of contemplation. The exhibition includes painting, works on paper, video, and one sculptural piece.
The exhibition is on view through June 30, 2019.