Structures of Feeling
2022 A.I.R. National Members Exhibition
GALLERY I, II, & III
Chloe Abbadessa, Spoiled Milk I, 2020, Linen, quilted silk chiffon, Fairtrade US cotton, Polyfill, cement, 6 x 10 ½ x 4 ¾ inches.
July 1 - 31, 2022 Opening reception: Friday, July 1 from 6-8pm
Curated by Rosario Güiraldes
Chloe Abbadessa, Hend Al-Mansour, Diane Cionni, Robin Dintiman, Kathryn Hart, Nicole Havekost, Marlana Stoddard Hayes, Olga Hiiva, Jody Joldersma, Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann, Jennifer McCandless, Simone Paterson, Allison Paschke, Martha Sedgwick, Ann Stoddard, Vicky Tomayko, Ellyn Weiss, Holly Wong, Joo Yeon Woo, Alice Pixley Young
A.I.R. Gallery is pleased to present Structures of Feeling, a group exhibition curated by Rosario Güiraldes that features work by A.I.R. National Artist Members Chloe Abbadessa, Hend Al-Mansour, Diane Cionni, Robin Dintiman, Kathryn Hart, Nicole Havekost, Marlana Stoddard Hayes, Olga Hiiva, Jody Joldersma, Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann, Jennifer McCandless, Simone Paterson, Allison Paschke, Martha Sedgwick, Ann Stoddard, Vicky Tomayko, Ellyn Weiss, Holly Wong, Joo Yeon Woo, and Alice Pixley Young.
Structures of Feeling borrows its title from a phrase coined by the late theorist Raymond Williams to describe the pulse or beat of an epoch as felt by a specific group of people at a given moment in time. Williams writes, “We are talking about characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically, affective elements of consciousness and relationships, not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and inter-relating continuity.” It is a difficult concept to grasp. But it is also an apt way to approach how artworks sometimes articulate what language fails to; how they can, at times, express what one knows but cannot name or describe, conjuring the wondrous surprise at recognizing in an artwork that which before had gone unspoken.
The works included in this exhibition, consisting of paintings, sculptures, works on paper, photographs, and video, represent a wide range of stylistic approaches and personal backgrounds. At the same time, all of these works share a similar impulse in their attempt to make tangible and palpable what otherwise remains subtle or uncertain; to render visible aspects of present life that have yet to be assimilated by culture. This space of “practical consciousness,” as Williams puts it, is embodied by many of the works, while also prompting questions of representation and politics, insofar as addressing matters in society and ultimately transforming them requires first that we learn to represent these matters aesthetically. Many of the works in this exhibition show an interest in social transformation and thus in the construction of a “structure of feeling.”
This notion might not simply be a useful way to describe the themes present in each of the included works, but also a metaphor for the exhibition as a whole, inasmuch as it enables an understanding of what it feels like to be in the here and now, evoking an incipient structure of feeling for this specific group of artists, at this particular moment in time.
Rosario Güiraldes is an Argentine curator who lives and works in New York. Güiraldes is the Associate Curator of The Drawing Center. Recent curated exhibitions at The Drawing Center include Drawing in the Continuous Present (2022); Fernanda Laguna: The Path of the Heart (2022); Ebecho Muslimova: Scenes in the Sublevel (2021); 100 Drawings from Now (2020); Guo Fengyi: To See from a Distance (2020); and The Pencil is a Key: Drawings by Incarcerated Artists (2019). From 2017 through 2020, Güiraldes served as co-curator of Open Sessions; a two-year program for 30 early-career artists who explored the nature of drawing in its many manifestations through thematic group exhibitions, public programs, monthly group meetings, and individual studio visits. In 2017, her large-scale survey exhibition Forensic Architecture: Towards an Investigative Aesthetics was presented at MACBA in Barcelona and MUAC in Mexico City, earning Forensic Architecture a 2018 Turner Prize nomination. Güiraldes’s recent writing includes catalog texts on Fernanda Laguna, Guo Fengyi, Tala Madani, and Forensic Architecture, among others. Güiraldes holds an M.Arch from the Facultad de Diseño y Urbanismo (FADU), Universidad de Buenos Aires and an MA in Curatorial Studies from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. She is a Visiting Critic at the Yale School of Art Department of Painting and Printmaking.
View the Press Release here.
Photography: Sebastian Bach