COVID-19
Art spaces have spent the past year figuring out how to share the work on their walls with an audience that due to measures of public safety could not be physically present. Is there a more beautiful solution than that of the Bradley University Galleries? To fill the void left by visitors, curators Erin Buczynski and Hattie Lee installed Seen but not Felt on every square inch of flooring, creating a gesamtkunstwerk out of the overlapping textiles, prints, reliefs, small assemblages, and quilts of fourteen artists, themselves included. Photos of the exhibition (which can also be seen, in person, through the gallery’s ground floor windows and by students from a second-floor catwalk) reveal a thrillingly cacophonic patchwork, a crowd of strangers, a scene of artworks laying across one another, mingling freely and without concern. Without a schematic it’s impossible to know who made what, but it hardly matters in the face of so much desperately missed, if totally surrogate, collective touching. I want to be that art.
—Lori Waxman 2021-04-28 2:26 PM