These

inv_Sible_

Collisions

Group Exhibition

Curated by

Stevie Kincheloe

Featuring works from

TB ward

steven dayvid mckellar

Elena reNdina

Kelsey Kuykendall

stevie kincheloe

curatorial statement

After all, the world is around me, not in front of me.

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Eye and Mind

For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated with the invisible; just beyond the tips of my fingers, a silent reality, coexisting and colliding with my own. I indulged and traced this quiet thread through art, expression, and self-reflection, through books on philosophy, spirituality, and quantum physics, only to find the smoke and mirrors of a greater mystery.

When it comes to the conceptualization of the finite, the infinite, the visible or the invisible, where do each of these truly begin or end? How does one define the boundaries between Self and Other? When and how do they collide and create something new? How do they reach across an unseen expanse and touch or alter our own realities?

Through a Jungian lens, we come to understand reality as shaped by a projection of the subconscious. Jung wrote, Projection changes the world into the replica of one’s own unknown face. Anaïs Nin put it most poetically when she wrote, We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are. And perhaps even more reflective, Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes:

We never have before us pure individuals, indivisible glaciers of beings…We are experiences….thoughts that feel behind themselves…and have about themselves a time and a space that exist by piling up, by proliferation, by encroachment…

Here Merleau-Ponty writes that the conceptual framework of Self or lived experience, what we might define as reality, are inherently overlapping, unfinished, and mutually conditioning. When peering through this phenomenological lens, these theoretical caveats bring to mind two scientific concepts I find endlessly fascinating: quantum entanglement and chaos theory.

Quantum entanglement proposes that, at a fundamental level, reality can be understood as relational, emerging from a field of potential, rather than from isolated parts. What we perceive as the Self or reality only takes form, through collision—interaction— or observation. We begin as part of this infinite field of potential, and it is through the gathering of definitions and concepts that we take shape, metaphorically forming a Self. That Self continues to collide with the infinite field, interpreting each encounter through the lens by which we have learned to perceive our reality. In this way, we are both creating collisions through our definitions and interpreting those collisions, layering meaning upon experience as we move through the field of infinite potential.

In Edward Lorenz’s chaos theory, you may know it as ‘the butterfly effect,’ we find that each micro-decision, definition, or interaction can ripple outward and create macro-level shifts. I see this concept reflected in a passage from Virginia Woolf:

The most ordinary movement in the world may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments—now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing, dipping and flaunting.

The works presented in These Inv_sible_ Collisions seek to make visible these Self constructs and definitions while simultaneously creating new collision points as each work interacts with each other and with the viewer. The viewer, in turn, brings their own definitions into the space, creating an experience shaped by unseen intersections, an invisible collision that is momentary, relational, and entirely new.