Kinesthesia: Body as Form

Kinesthesia is the awareness of bodily movements through sensory organs (proprioceptors) in the muscles and joints. Common examples of kinesthesia include walking without looking at one’s feet or typing without looking at one’s hands. For our purposes, the more relevant example is dance (or movement, as it has come to be called in advanced fine arts programs), which, like music (or sound), is once again having a moment among visual artists open to expanding their practices beyond sight-specific media.

“This exhibition presented an opportunity for me to bring together all kinds of different voices,” says curator Rhys Edwards. “As well as visual artists who incorporate dance into their work, there are choreographers, dancers and filmmakers from across the country that you might not typically find inside of a visual arts space. You’ll see performance art, street dance, contemporary dance, contact improvisation and more. I wanted to create a dialogue between practitioners from different regions, backgrounds and at different places in their career.”

Though focused on “the process where a body comes into an awareness of itself in space,” the exhibition features a range of works in a variety of object-based media, from sculpture, painting and textiles to photography, film and virtual reality. Among the topics taken up, embodiment, choreography, healing, ritual, performance and transcendence are most resonant. Exhibition participants are drawn from across the country and include All Bodies Dance, ĀNANDAM dance theatre, Justine A. Chambers, Fran Chudnoff, Brendan Fernandes, Ronald Li, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Lucy M. May, Dana Michel, Maisie O’Brien, Evann Siebens and Sarah Nash Wong.

Concurrent with the show is a season of live events. For more information, see under Exhibitions on the gallery website.

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