Abject/Object Empathies (2016)

Abject/Object Empathies

Curated for the 2016 CCA biennial, “Abject/Object Empathies” addresses the ways in which feeling is form and explore how the objects, buildings, clothing, machines, languages, and images we construct are shaped by our intentional or implicit emotional, interdependent relationship to others.

Whether by framing a connection that already exists or by providing the condition for new connections, what we create can either merely extend our own personal desires, goals, and directives, or can alternatively function as a bridge between who I am and who you are so that aesthetic experiences are interdependent, collaboratively generated and inherently reciprocal.

Side By Side

Site Specific Project by Pepón Osorio

Curated by Stephanie Owens for Cornell Council for the Arts

Connecting Two Worlds

Commissioned by the Cornell Council for the Arts (CCA) as part of its 2016 Biennial entitled, Abject/Object Empathies, “Side by Side” a new, site-specific installation by Philadelphia-based, multimedia artist Pepón Osorio. Osorio has spent the last year making numerous trips to Ithaca to meet and get to know many members of the Cornell and Ithaca community. Visitors to the installation are invited into a personal world turned upside-down, by the overwhelming reality often lived by those who have transformed turmoil, dislocation, loss and trauma into strategies for endurance, resistance and determination. The exhibition is filled with moving images that evoke reflection on the complexity of our contemporary lives.

Side by Side tells the story of a local family matriarch who, as a grandmother to nine young boys, holds her family together over many generations. Staged as an enormous upside-down house wedged tight between floor and ceiling and covered in lottery tickets that promise dreams of a better life, Side by Side is at once an intimate portrait, social critique and compassionate expression of inclusion and persistence.