In Practice: Material Deviance

Informed by encounters with the quotidian, unassuming stuff of life and its circulation, the artists included in Material Deviance connect material and bodily processes with social and infrastructural ones. The artists look to irregularities, glitches, gaps, residues, and altered states - either found or enacted - as a means of accessing the latent histories of materials in order to expose underlying systems of power, regulation, value, and control. While these systems inevitably shape the movement of bodies through the world (both at the level of the individual and the social), the works on view reveal the cracks where counter-movements and improvisational modes of being and perceiving are possible.

Some of the artists in the exhibition produce material dissonance by rearranging narratives, altering properties, leaving traces of actions, and otherwise making the familiar strange, while others mine the inherent deviations and fissures they find in materials, pointing to the ways that things - like bodies - manage to exceed and even disrupt the systems that attempt to contain them. Often resisting the arrival of a fixed or final state, the artists instead offer a mode of perpetual and intimate exchange that occurs when bodies and materials move alongside or in friction with one another - teasing out the circuitous, and sometimes absurd, movements found between uniformity and difference, function and non-function, control and subversion.

The exhibition features newly commissioned works by Lauren Bakst & Yuri Masnyj, Olivia Booth, Kim Brandt, Crystal Z Campbell, Danielle Dean, Ilana Harris-Babou, Jesse Harrod, Candice Lin and Patrick Staff, Virginia Lee Montgomery, Kate Newby, Barb Smith, Marian Tubbs, and Jessica Vaughn.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.