Laurie M. Tisch Gallery

Current Exhibit

RITUALS

EZRA BENUS  |  ROMILY ALICE WALDEN  |  YO-YO LIN

The Laurie M. Tisch Gallery

On View February 25 - April 13, 2020

Ritual binds people across time and space, building norms that cultivate personal and collective meaning and structure. Akin to this, rituals captured through experiences of disability and illness create temporalities of time and space that are flexible and fluctuating, not easily defined by static structures designed without disabled and sick people in mind. The artists in this exhibition reconfigure what constitutes and marks the mundaneness of the everyday through ritual, tapping into embodiments of living with illness and disability to create a never-ending flow of curiosity and contemplation. Through abstraction, the artists claim space, mark time, and present expansive ways of understanding illness and disability. These configurations of disability maintain bodily knowledge as vital to a rumination on the corporeal and our existence in an interdependent world. In the artists’ own formulations of sick and disabled aesthetics, time, and space, this exhibition showcases different ways illness and disability have connective and ritual potential.

Listening to our bodies and their needs in all their sick and disabled glory opens opportunity for honoring and caring for the body/mind and for others, insisting on bodily knowledge and care as invaluable in the continued effort toward building understanding and an equitable society. The artists articulate the complexity of exhaustively living with chronic pain, navigating care systems, and reckoning with relationships to self and to others through demarcations of patterning, flickering, shading, scattering, jolting, and reflecting. The range of works presented are linked to the enduring legacy of exercising rituals to hold meaning and structure for living in a complex and chaotic world.

Curated by Ezra Benus.
Rituals is presented in partnership with ReelAbilities: New York Film Festival.