- Venue
- 4th Floor of the BGC Gallery, Bard Graduate Centre
- Starts
- Friday, December 6, 2019
- Ends
- Monday, January 6, 2020
- Address
- 18 West 86th Street, New York
- Location
- United States
Emotional objects: things overloaded with feeling
December 6th, 2019–January 5th, 2020
Private View December 6th 5-7 pm
Ellen Sampson is an artist and material culture researcher whose work explores the relationships between bodies, memory, and clothing, in museums and archives and in everyday life. During her residency and through the pop-up exhibition, Sampson will explore the material culture of emotion through two everyday objects: the handkerchief and the glove.
Clothes are amongst our most emotional objects – sites where multiple feelings may be produced, performed and contained. Though the capacity to contain and induce emotion is common to all material things, those we associate with garments are often particularly potent. This exhibition explores the emotional affects of clothing through two everyday objects: the handkerchief and the glove. They are emotional objects, artefacts which convey, stand-in for and embody emotion. These artefacts, mundane, yet overdetermined, are bound up with the etiquette and traditions of courting and mourning, of private and public, of work and of war. They are souvenirs, love tokens, and mementoes: deeply entangled with performances of love, labour and grief. Despite their ritualized and socially prescribed modes of use gloves and handkerchiefs are also deeply personal and tactile objects, often understood as indivisible from those who used them. They are bodily objects, objects that stand in for and act upon us in lieu of absent bodies.
The pop-up exhibition will be on view on the 4th Floor of the BGC Gallery.
About Ellen Sampson
Ellen Sampson is an artist and material culture researcher whose work explores the relationships between bodies, objects and experience both in museums and archives and in everyday life. She uses image-making as a way of engaging with the intricacies of wear, gesture, and trace. In exploring the resonances of worn and used artefacts, she seeks to uncover how attachment to the material world is produced and maintained. She holds a PhD from the Royal College of Art and was the 2018–19 Polaire Weissman Fellow at The Costume Institute – The Metropolitan Museum of Art, working on a projected titled “The Afterlives of Clothes.” She is currently a Professorial Fellow at University for the Creative Arts, UK.
About Bard Graduate Center
As the leading research institute in the United States dedicated to the study of decorative arts, design history,
and material culture, Bard Graduate Center and its Gallery have pioneered the study of objects as a means to better understand the cultural history of the material world. Offering experiences for scholars, students, and the general public alike – Bard Graduate Center is built on multidisciplinary study and the integration of research, graduate teaching, and public exhibitions.
Contact
Ellen Sampson
[email protected]
www.ellensampson.com
