Let's Be Real

Adam Hurwitz, Julian Kreimer, Kerry Law, Beth Livensperger, Anna Plesset, Roger White, Sophie White. Curated by Hilary Doyle & Reid Hitt

Let’s Be Real is a group exhibition of artists who work from observation or memory. The show investigates the act of examination of visual information in the world around us. Does an artist’s subject stand in for the self? Can an artist’s study of the visual world reveal a psychological and emotional state?

There are many examples of artists throughout history whose work reveals their inner self. Precedents include American painters Charles Sheeler, George Ault, and Neil Welliver. Perhaps due to their tragic lives, all three artists painted banal spaces with a strange charge. Sheeler shared a farmhouse with the artist Morton Schamberg, who died in the influenza epidemic of 1918. After Schamberg’s death, Sheeler painted and photographed their home’s pot-belly stove—which he called his “companion.”

Observational work also has the power to reveal happiness as in the work of Matisse or Bonnard.

The artists in Let’s Be Real each give their works an emotional charge based on their experiences and thought process. Some artists strive for complete concentration, while others can let their minds drift to think about personal aspects of their lives. “People today spend 47% of their day lost in thought.” † This show asks us to consider how the artist’s state of mind might subtlely effect their work.

† http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2010/11/wandering-mind-not-a-happy-mind/