We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are. – Anaïs Nin
What is that special something that attracts you to a work of art, or a person for that matter? It’s often hard to define or put into words. Yet there are undeniably times that you see a work of art amongst hundreds that speaks to you in a way the others don’t. Perhaps it’s a small oil painting, or a large public sculpture, a cathedral or a drawing, but it transforms you in some way. It touches you in some profound manner. And that’s the power of art. It beckons and informs, it touches our humanity and it transforms us.
Unsettled Gallery is having an exhibition about this transformative quality of attraction. Gallery director, Catherine Smith Brenner has asked me to curate it.
The work in some way should address the theme about what that certain something – that quality of attraction, actually is. It may be about beauty but it is just as often not that at all. It could be about the concept, smell, texture, form or some other attribute displayed by the work. Is it that it reminds us of something from our past, that it touches some remote emotion or that it hangs well in the framework of our individual psyche?
What are the unique qualities that attract you as an artist, or anyone else, to a work of art?
Submission deadline is 13 October 2014.
Download the Prospectus for more information.