Handheld

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum is pleased to present Handheld, a group exhibition that explores the contemporary meaning of touch by charting artists’, designers’, and makers’ various responses to objects scaled to the hand.

Touch is, in many ways, our most intimate sense, and our hands are its primary agents. Hands are meant to hold lots of things: pencils, babies, heavy pieces of furniture, other people’s hands. Yet, for many of us in today’s world, the feeling in our hands that is most familiar is the easy weight of our handheld devices. Today, touch increasingly takes the form of a swipe, where sensation is often ignored in favor of access to the flat visual landscapes of our own selection—a place where we can look at imagery as much as we want, but we cannot touch. However, as we think of traditional forms for our most precious things the words of grandmothers echo worldwide, “Look but don’t touch.” This surprising parallel between the domestic and the digital offers viewers a point of departure to consider the relationship between haptic and optic, hand and eye, in contemporary life.

Materials are central to Handheld. Clay and metal can, quite literally, record fingerprints and movement, glass is blown with our breath, and fiber traces the finger’s work. These materials also happen to be those most familiar to our everyday: the feel of our favorite coffee cup, our faucet tap, our sheets as we climb into bed. Seeking questions rather than answers, Handheld uses the common language of the domestic to examine the complex role of the hand.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.