Settle Down

Whether quiet fragments of vine, the fight that we want to break out or the quiet and often disquieting rapture of lonely spaces, Settle Down creates an outlet for feelings of restlessness. Only intensified by the unrest and pain of these last year’s new precedents, the question “How Do We Do This?” runs throughout. In many ways this is an anthem for the artist’s practice when the internal stir of an idea must be translated into action; or when that idea does not present itself. Sometimes we are called to report to the most mundane of duties. How do we stick this foam pickle to that rubber ball? One way or another it is always a matter of doing, of making the work.

While spanning mediums and media, this show is thoroughly affected by life’s quisicalities, quiet and loud. How do we retain a relationship to nature while it is burning and drowning? How can we make sense of our friendships and social worlds in a deeply divided and increasingly less-embodied space? The work here is not about providing answers to these questions but rather asking them—and asserting the value of doing so. If there is any answer here, it comes through the embrace of objects as a mode of working out how to do in life and art—a movement away from certainty and towards a sense of wonder at the astounding complexity of the world. —Francis Louvis ‘15