Octet: Selected Works from the School of Visual Arts, New York

Relational Aesthetics
Relational Aesthetics, a term coined in 2002 by Nicolas Bourriaud refers to a kind of art that interacts with its onlookers.  Not based on formal concerns of aesthetic experience, audience participation is a necessary and required aspect of this type of work. Like the Situationists before them, practitioners in this field aim towards developing collective social experiences, and endeavors to fuse art with life.

Word As Image
To conceive of words as flesh, or breath or abstract signs, integrating words with the visual arts has had a cross-cultural history.  From the Rosetta Stone to oracle bones, from bark cloth paintings, to illuminated manuscripts, words turn sounds into a concrete script. Simple lines and dots, dabs and flows, arabesques and undulating rhythms displace the articulating voice in the external world.

Identity and Identity Politics
What does it mean to be human?  What does it mean to be part of a marginalized social group?  How do race, religion, and/or gender, constitute an identity? The manner in which the self is defined is expressed through physical attributes, shared social values or political persuasions. In heterogeneous societies, such as America, a melting pot of citizens from Italian, Irish, Jewish, Arab, African, Chinese, Hispanic and Turkish descent among others, form distinct communities. Assimilating variegated cultural identities into the larger fabric of American life creates a multi-racial, multi-ethnic composite population.  What does it mean to be an Asian-American or a Latino in the USA? Although we all share the primary structure of DNA, making us human, we each are also distinctly unique.