Façade

Visual Arts Center

January 20 – March 10, 2023

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In architecture, façadism refers to the preservation of an older building’s exterior when a new structure is erected behind or around it. Museums implement institutional display as a façade in order to elevate objects into historical significance. The cultivation of grass, flowers, and other forms of landscaping can be understood as a façade for neighbors and other passersby. With this, a façade can be thought of as an outward appearance that conceals a less pleasant or creditable reality. The façades we develop, maintain, and allow to flourish play an integral role in how we interpret and interact with our surroundings—they have the potential to conceal, protect, and communicate for us and about us in various ways. However, we often overlook our relationship to surfaces and exteriors, losing our connection to the vulnerable and sincere within.

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Façade brings together the work of artists from various disciplines and backgrounds, who explore the truths that exist within any given object, historical narrative, or our performances of identity. Through sculpture, works on paper, video and painting, these artists question outward appearances, both personal and communal, addressing the notion of an idealized self, replicas, false control, and performative interactions. In doing so, they attempt to uncover the motivations behind our drive to conceal, perform, and play pretend.

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Exhibition artists Luna Davis and Rowan Howe allude to the body as a performative space. Annie May Johnston and Rand Renfrow question the mask of institutional display. Katy McCarthy and Jennifer Ling Datchuck investigate the construction of multi-layered identities and personas. Informed by instructional videos, Hannah Spector comments on the façade of conversation, listening, and understanding. Quinn In, Mac Benson, and Ariel Wood take inspiration from vernacular architecture to explore interconnectedness, history, and irony within public spaces. The artists in this exhibition consider façade an unignorable reality, one that begs for cultivation and control. They encourage visitors to take a critical view of façadism, examining how our attachments to performance and deception influence our experiences of the world around us.

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Façade is organized by Mac Benson, Luna Davis, and Rowan Howe, with Center Space Project.