Dates:
Location:
Focus Gallery, Media Gallery, Center Gallery, RotundaSelected Works
Reza Aramesh, Site of the Fall – Study of the Renaissance Garden Action 247: At 11:45 am Friday 27 June 2003, 2023, marble. ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø±¬ÍøÕ¾ College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine. Museum purchase, the Laura T. and John H. Halford, Jr. Art Acquisition Fund. Acquisition in process.
Zanele Muholi, Sine IV, Melbourne, Australia, from the series Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness), 2020, gelatin silver print. ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø±¬ÍøÕ¾ College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine. Museum Purchase, Gridley W. Tarbell II Fund.
Titus Kaphar, The Jerome Project (Asphalt and Chalk) XI, 2015. Chalk on asphalt paper. ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø±¬ÍøÕ¾ College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine. Museum Purchase, Barbara Cooney Porter Fund.
Chan Chao, Araceli and Friend, October 2006 (Country of Origin: Spain), 2006, archival pigment print. ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø±¬ÍøÕ¾ College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine. Gift of the artist and Jennifer Cohan.
About
Irreplaceable You features works of art that resist the rendering of human lives into objects of consumption, data sets, and/or algorithms. The exhibition touches on subjects from the recent and not-so-recent past, looking at how art helps build our capacity for empathy when our worldviews are often shaped by the twenty-four-hour news cycle and the Internet. Employing strategies like portraiture, storytelling, naming, and sometimes even traces of their own bodies, artists featured in Irreplaceable You work with diverse media and engage with social and political issues in numerous contexts. Several are also educators and activists. They ask us to consider: How do we navigate the tensions and ambiguities between things like empathy and dehumanization, visibility and spectacle, safety and precarity? How do we—as individuals and as a society—recognize the personhood and dignity of those we don’t know and perhaps even those we do?