about desire
Curated by Meagan Atiyeh
December 5, 2013 – January 25, 2014
University of Oregon’s White Box visual laboratory presents about desire, curated by Meagan Atiyeh.
The exhibition brings together paintings, sculpture, video, photography and mixed media works by artists Delaney Allen, Nancy Bulalacao, Jacques Flechemuller, Sally Haley (1908-2007), Tahni Holt, Kristan Kennedy, Isaac Layman, Storm Tharp, and Terry Toedtemeier (1947-2008). Atiyeh has thoughtfully selected a small body of work through which we can investigate the relationship of viewers and fine art objects within the context of a gallery. Atiyeh is interested in how our initial experiences with a work translate to memory, and how that memory breeds desire.
The exhibition will open December 5, 2013, with one work installed in the gallery at a time. January 9, 2014, all exhibits will be installed.
“About Desire is, in part, an attempt to reveal the relationship between viewer and object, to satisfy and frustrate patterns of experiencing art,” Atiyeh says. “It is an exercise in essentialism for which White Box, a community-facing venue with academic interest in ideas, provides a fitting opportunity.”
She continues, “Besides being an underpinning of the exhibition’s structure, desire is also a connecting line between each of the works. Desire is a pervasive word. I see it as a beginning. These artworks traverse ideas of gender, power, and artistic restraint.”
White Box will host a public reception on Saturday, January 25, 2014 from 5pm – 8pm and will include a curator’s talk by Meagan Atiyeh.
Meagan Atiyeh is a writer and independent curator. She is the visual arts coordinator for the Oregon Arts Commission and manages Oregon’s Percent for Art in Public Places program. Prior to joining the Arts Commission, Atiyeh served in several capacities at the Portland Art Museum’s Northwest Film Center, where she was the director of the Northwest Film & Video Festival. Atiyeh holds a bachelor of arts in writing, literature, and the arts from Eugene Lang College of The New School for Liberal Arts in New York. She organizes independent curatorial projects, and her writing has appeared in The Organ Review of Arts and Deviant Fictions: An Anthology of Northwest Experimental Writing. Atiyeh has also served on the boards of the University of Oregon School of Architecture and Allied Arts and Disjecta Contemporary Art Center.
