Spazi Segreti, or Mendacity, Mood

A simposio exhibit

The lexico-thematic backdrop to Spazi Segreti, or Mendacity, Mood is furnished by the rich prose, rhapsodic imagery, and transfigurable, transtemporal and, at times, transgendered personas of Jeannette Winterson’s Art & Lies, a novel whose craftily sewn pleats within buttery narrative folds will be variably explicated — very literally, in etymological terms — by the works on display and the participating artists’ manually transcribed extractions from the text itself.

Come for the visual prose. Come for the etymologies. Come explore, that is, the secret spaces and mendacious emotions of an aesthetic range of evocative artworks, themselves collectively evoked by a fictive work whose evocational words, hummed in a key of timelessness, echo the variably vocalized creative callings of artists and artworks, as well as the various figures, histories and chance-ridden conditions that now mystify, now enrich, now belie them.

Featured artists: Deborah Brown, Jenn Brehm, Mary Kate Maher, Karilyn Johanesen, Ali Aschman, Erin Batson and Rachel Day.

Simposio reading assignment: Art & Lies, by Jeannette Winterson (New York: Knopf, 1995).