The body is an organic vessel for emotions, desires, and physiological mechanisms. It is also an interface that facilitates the formation and display of identity and self-awareness. Like a shifting tectonic plate, the body responds to external happenings and builds communities that accommodate diverse experiences. The visceral body can self-isolate or forge alliances. Feelings of unresolved love, lust, loneliness, and loss dwell deep inside our crimson viscera, as impulses to reach out, seek companionship, and confront bring forward the outside world. How do humans, as animals, navigate freely between the inside and the outside of our physical entrapment? How do we inhabit someone else’s skin, break down barriers, and, ultimately, depart from our own bodies?

The themes for this exhibition stem from the two female curators’ discomfort and insecurities with individualization under societal expectations as millennials transitioning into their mid-30s. By sharing and referencing each other’s personal crisis and stories, we compare differences and locate points of resonance in the hopes of illuminating some fraction of a universal truth deep-seated within our subjective souls as well as our collective, contemporary existence.

The work featured are introspective, intuitive, or imbued with tender insights into human vulnerabilities. They are often reflective of the makers’ lived experiences, and form a series of true, luminous narratives. Poetic and dream-like, these findings and testimonials are portals connecting the wandering thoughts that endlessly redefine the inside and the outside, the individual and the collective. The exhibition aspires to make room for meaningful encounters and understanding. It highlights the value of ‘inner knowledge’—knowledge that encapsulates the emotional, sensorial, and abstract inner terrain of our being—and offers a subjectivity-centered approach that is alternative to practices rooted in academic discourses and intellectual discoveries privileged by the mainstream art world.