Curated by David Gibson and Jennifer Junkermeier

Bethany Bristow, Bonnie Collura, Gabert Farrar, Limor Gasko, Scott Kiernan, Karen Marston, John O’Brien, Sono Osato, Meridith Pingree, Richard Schort, Fumiko Toda

Beauty’s Burden explores our pre-determined attitudes toward art as a means of personal and cultural expression. In a museum-style exhibition that is directed only by its theme, we hope to show how beauty operates in collusion with the specific dictates of image and form, occurring randomly across mediums, flowing through the cracks in our understanding of each artist’s process.

Beauty in this case does not represent an idealized standard, but an element of culturally determined content that collaborates in the moment (or process) of creation with ideas specific to each artist’s formal aim. The artists in this exhibition were chosen because their work contained ideas about the vestigial origin of creativity.

Each artist’s specific achivement was neither depedent upon a realization of form that was pleasing to the eye, nor signified a form of idealism beyond individual concerns: obscure or ambigiuous references to architecture, mathematics, biology, computer image sampling, and the obsolescence of the machine age. Yet each has brought us a little closer to finding a way back to beauty, and forward in time to a new place for aesthetic discovery.