Touch forms the conceptual and sensory thread linking “Don’t we touch each other just to prove we are still here?”: Photography and Touch. The exhibition, titled after a line from a poem by the Vietnamese American writer Ocean Vuong, features the work of thirteen international artists who explore the expressive possibilities of touch through photography, film, and video. From tender gestures between loved ones and charged encounters between strangers to haptic engagements with materials, the artworks foreground touch as a mode of communication, understanding, and connection. Some pieces embed touch directly through the artist’s imprint or manipulation, while others evoke it more metaphorically and symbolically. Together the works reveal the manifold meanings touch carries for us. After the disruption of physical contact caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, Photography and Touch offers different perspectives on how touch shapes us as social, vulnerable, feeling beings and is a timely meditation on what it reveals about our common humanity.
Guest Curated by Susannah Baker-Smith and Susan Bright.