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Comfort Zones
We are in the midst of navigating comfort zones. We have, this year, been thrust far, far outside of their boundaries by circumstances fundamentally challenging to our lives, our communities, and our institutions. At the same time, we have sought to establish spaces of comfort for ourselves — in caring for others, in our physical environments, with our lived routines.
The artists in this exhibition are students from many disciplines — psychology, mathematics, gender studies, chemistry, history, computer science, education, biology, management, neuroscience, and finance — who navigated the parameters of academic and aesthetic comfort zones to consider radical notions of art-making, critical discourse, and creative practice. We were brought together by “Experimental Arts,” my seminar offered this fall in the Honors College of the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers University-Newark. Throughout the course, we studied artists who transcended institutional norms to respond to the challenges of their moments — wars, social injustices, and pandemics among them. With particular attention, we considered how these artists re-visioned existing definitions of art and innovated new forms that principally serve to document ideas, processes, and activities. You will find a range of approaches to form in this exhibition. Each piece, introduced by an artist statement, exists in conversation with the histories, methodologies, and concepts we encountered and attempts to process and transform novel information and ideas.
Circumstances required us to talk and work entirely remotely through the semester, but our meetings were no cold comfort for me. Rather, with each class session, these student-artists and intellectuals reminded me of the potential of the human spirit to adapt, to persevere, to uplift, to create, to establish channels for productive contemplation of a more and more joyful future —
Dr. Kate Doyle, Exhibition Curator
Instructor, Experimental Arts, SASN Honors College Seminar, Fall 2020
Assistant Professor of Music, Department of Arts, Culture & Media, Rutgers University-Newark