Concordia’s Art History Graduate Student Association’s
15th Annual Graduate Symposium in Art History:
Empathy/Empathie
Conference: February 5th - 6th, 2021
Virtual Vitrine: January 18th - February 28th, 2021
Curated by Maegan Gaudette and Michelle Sones, exhibition design by Yasmeen Kanaan.
Featuring artists Ayla Dmyterko, Hannah Evans, Imogen Rennie, Xiao Han, Shazia Ahmad, and Amber Morrison.
What potentials do intentional or practiced empathy hold? Empathy encapsulates a generative force that exposes our relational ties to others, highlighting that we are dependent upon our greater social and environmental contingencies. In this, we are influenced greatly by our pasts and often hold a great amount of tenderness and consideration for our histories, both collective and individual. Such inquiry holds the potential to enliven and uncover truths, bridging narratives with the subjectivities of lived experiences, noting while resituating memories that have been lost, dismissed, spoken-for, or forgotten.
The artists curated in this exhibition engage with intentional empathy in a variety of ways, approaching the potentials that lie within profound feeling, unabashed emotion, and self-reflection. These modes of inquiry can bridge and fasten histories that expand beyond a singular temporal, geographical, or spatial realm, encouraging remembrance, appreciation, and above all, preservation – platonically, romantically, medically, and culturally. Additionally, implied are one’s intentions behind their intellectual, artistic, and emotional engagement, displaying inhibitions, anticipations, or fears while simultaneously exposing the positives of hopefulness and deliberate – and oftentimes critical – nostalgia.
Through these artist’s various artistic lenses, legacies of attachment, compassion, and the greater possibilities of connectivity are exposed between both human and non-human others. While empathy does have tangible limitations, these artists employ dialogues that suggest memory as a powerful tool that may be used for the betterment of self and others – revealing the harmonious and untethered potentials intrinsically embedded into empathy, care, and acts of compassion.
Curatorial statement written by Maegan Gaudette.
Graphic design by Maegan Gaudette.