Opening reception: Terry Berlier: I am what I am not yet

Date
Thu January 23rd 2020, 5:00 - 7:00pm
Event Sponsor
Department of Art & Art History
Location
Stanford Art Gallery
Opening reception: Terry Berlier: I am what I am not yet

Artist and Professor Terry Berlier brings together her interest in queerness and ecologies in I am what I am not yet, a solo exhibition at the Stanford Art Gallery, on view January 21 to March 15, 2020. Using abstract labored forms, kinetic and sound sculpture, her work suggests a path of reorienting to the world, turning things around so they can be understood differently. Join us for the opening reception on Thursday, January 23, 5–7 pm.

Berlier approaches her studio practice as a playful, open-ended, experimental process. She used desire lines, the landscape architecture term for marks left on the ground when one veers from the normative path, as her point of departure to explore queer persistence. These deviations leave temporary paths that, when used repeatedly, change the landscape. The works in this exhibit call attention to forced invisibility and attempts to see oneself, to be seen, as they address the small and particular ways we move, delineate, and protect ourselves amidst environmental and political crises.

Through archival research, Berlier examined collective responses to political threat and those repeated micro-actions and interactions enacted in everyday life. Conceptually, the works in this exhibition do the same, weaving between the crisis in the current US presidency and world instability to queering the possible. With embossed writing, mobiuses (unending, and nonorientable), hat sculptures, and shoes, Berlier lends form and visibility to those things that are often felt but unseen.

Drawing the exhibition title from education and aesthetic philosopher Maxine Greene, I Am What I Am Not Yet, refers to our enduring, even grasping, pursuit of a sense of completion.

Image: Terry Berlier. Nonorientable (Kokedera), 2019.

VISITOR INFORMATION: Stanford Art Gallery is located at 419 Lasuen Mall. Visitor parking is free all day on weekends and after 4 pm on weekdays, except by the Oval. Alternatively, take the Caltrain to Palo Alto Transit Center and ride the free Stanford Marguerite Shuttle.

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