University of Oregon’s White Box visual laboratory presents About Desire, curated by Meagan Atiyeh, visual arts coordinator for the Oregon Arts Commission.
The exhibition brings together paintings, sculpture, video, photography, and mixed media works by artists Delaney Allen, Nancy Bulalacao, Jacques Flechemuller, Sally Haley (1908-2007), Tahni Holt, Kristan Kennedy, Isaac Layman, Storm Tharp, and Terry Toedtemeier (1947-2008).
Atiyeh has selected a small body of work through which viewers can investigate the relationship of viewers and fine art objects within the context of a gallery. Atiyeh is interested in how our initial experiences with a work translate to memory, and how that memory breeds desire and longing to own an object.
The exhibition will open December 5 with one work installed. As the weeks progress, the exhibition will continue to add pieces at unannounced times during the duration of the show. By January 9, 2014, all exhibits will be installed.
“About Desire is, in part, an attempt to reveal the relationship between viewer and object, to satisfy and frustrate patterns of experiencing art,” Atiyeh says. “It is an exercise in essentialism for which White Box, a community-facing venue with academic interest in ideas, provides a fitting opportunity.”
She continues, “Besides being an underpinning of the exhibition's structure, desire is also a connecting line between each of the works. Desire is a pervasive word. I see it as a beginning. These artworks traverse ideas of gender, power, and artistic restraint, and have in common an unflinching prowess for their materials.”
The White Box will host a public reception on Thursday, January 9, 2014, from 5–8 p.m. that will include a curator’s talk by Atiyeh.
Atiyeh is a writer and independent curator. In addition to her work as visual arts coordinator for the Oregon Arts Commission, she manages Oregon's Percent for Art in Public Places program. Prior to joining the arts commission, she served in several capacities at the Portland Art Museum's Northwest Film Center, where she was the director of the Northwest Film & Video Festival.
Atiyeh holds a bachelor of arts in writing, literature, and the arts from Eugene Lang College of The New School for Liberal Arts in New York. She organizes independent curatorial projects, and her writing has appeared in The Organ Review of Arts and Deviant Fictions: An Anthology of Northwest Experimental Writing. She has also served on the boards of the University of Oregon School of Architecture and Allied Arts and Disjecta Contemporary Art Center. In 2014, Atiyeh will begin an 18-month long project, All Rise, in Seattle, with co-curator Elizabeth Spavento.