Close Encounters 2: Acts of Social Imaginations is the second installment of Provisions Library CLOSE ENOUNTERS exhibition series. The first appeared in 2008 at the American University Museum in Washington DC and was subtitled Facing the Future, focusing in the critical social perspectives of artists’ on the cusp of historic elections in the United States. The second and present episode investigates the specific ways different modes of engagement are created and experience, either in public space or in a gallery setting. As a non-traveling exhibition, The Denison Museum has been given the unique opportunity to show this second installment outside of New York.
Provision Library, Resources for Arts and Social Change, was given the opportunity to stage this exhibition first at the Nathan Cummings Foundation in New York-a place where the fields of art and social justice commingle- felt the need to address particularly charged questions: In which way do artists engage with their subject matter? How do they translate their engagement though the media they are working with? How do they involve audiences in their work? What kind of impacts are they aiming for? In short, how does the process of artistic engagement relate to the social sphere it is inevitably part of? And how should we imagine such relationships? Are they merely transactional, or can they be transformational?
Acts of Social Imagination raises such questions by juxtaposing documentation of temporary public art projects and gallery-based works focusing on the same themes. Taking as a starting point the multiplicity of artistic engagement, it investigates divergent ways in which artists function within the social realm. Exploring strategies that link individual experiences with social actions, the exhibition originates from the specific meaning created by the diversity of media used, investigating their confrontation, nearness and variety, their unique close encounter.
A culmination of art and social commentary, Acts of Social Imagination provides a platform for innovative practices. Envisioned as an active space, it offers room for reflection, research and active audience participation. Artworks are supplemented with a curated selection of books from Provisions Library’s collection, relating to and expanding on the themes and methods explored in the works of art. Presented non-hierarchically in an all-encompassing installation, the exhibition aims to open up new modes of engagement of looking, experiencing and acting in more integrated and responsible ways, both individually and socially.
Acts of Social Imagination is about the convergence of artists and audience, objects and ideas. It insists on the absolute necessity to create acts that leave traces, provide ruptures, and bring about changes in our contested social habitat.
Donald Russell & Neils Van Tomme, Provisions Learning Project.
