Participating artists: Jeanine Anthony, Jordan Buschur, Jamie Chiarello, Langdon Graves, Jesse Martin, John Monteith, Jac Lahav, Jeremy Olson, Purdy Eaton, Colette Robbins

This exhibition explores a subject matter, a generational attitude, and a population of overt talent all at once. The search for new experience always begins with a search for life, since it is life itself, in vernacular terms, which both defines and gives hope to the prospects of new experience. Life presents itself in a variety of means, and implies the possibility of communication. Each different life form impresses upon us a profound reinvention of what it means to originate, grow, thrive, take on habits and fulfill instincts, and create anew.

Nowhere do we see this as more overtly than in the labors of young artists. That said, all but two of the artists featured in “Signs of Life” are currently studying for their MFA at various New York area schools. Those two are still at a young enough age that their views and abilities match that of their peers in academic programs; they are all searching for meaning, and finding it in diverse sources that are either a result of their individual backgrounds, or which reside, and emerge, from formal and thematic discovery.

Like many artists today, the psychological and fantastic aspects of depiction stand in for the real or sensible, even when (and especially if) the realness of such images overpowers our ability to discern the potential value of the real. The expression in the title is common in science fiction stories when a spaceship first encounters a new world, the first thing they look for is evidence of intelligent life, the most initial suggestion of a human presence. But is there such a thing as a sensible reality, uninflected by irony or psychological complexity?