On Empathy

This exhibition does not assert a new idea; it takes poetic license. It assembles diverse practices of painting, sculpture, video, drawing, and textile as a proposition to explore different modes of empathy, including the devotional site, the diaristic obsession, or the affective archive, among others. Lingering on a cathexis for the ephemeral gesture, the haptic trace, or the chronicled homage, these works entangle the viewer into relational textures of lived experience. They approach formal inquiry with a sincerity that celebrates the vulnerability, idiosyncrasy, and imperfection latent in the part-objects and obscured histories of our interior lives. The conversation among the works and with the viewers seeks to kindle empathy by opening spaces of dialogue and creating the possibility of inhabiting subject positions that are both intimate and estranging.

“The desire of a reparative impulse, on the other hand, is additive and accretive... It wants to assemble and confer plenitude on an object that will then have resources to offer to an inchoate self.” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay is About You”

“Someone tells me: this kind of love is not viable. But how can you evaluate viability? Why is the viable a Good Thing? Why is it better to last than to burn?” Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

“It is with this movement, with the passage and dissolution of impressions, images, sensations, that analysis leaves off—that continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves.” Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance

Miciah Hussey
recently completed his Ph.D. in English from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He has worked at Artforum and Gladstone Gallery and contributed texts for numerous catalogues and magazines.