This show is an intervention. We, the student curators of this exhibition, are intervening in an institutional space. But more than that, we aim to intervene in your ways of seeing. Because the work in this show isn’t arranged like anything else in the Gallery; rather than fluid movement through the space, we want you to stop and scrutinize, to question our judgment, to reconsider your assumptions. The Kenyon curriculum teaches us to do exactly this. So forget the formidable white cube, and investigate this show as you would a text or data set in the classroom. How do these works function together and interact in the space? At a time when your blog, your playlist, and your closet can all be “curated,” we ask you to reconsider the meaning of the word.

The new Gund Gallery collection is as diverse as Kenyon itself, and the works on these walls share no unifying theme. But each of the artists on display is staging a visual intervention. They alternately expose, disguise, distort, and refine their subjects, intervening in our perception. We have grouped their work into oppositional pairs, that these distinct representational strategies might illuminate one another. What can a gesture expose, or a line refine? Is distortion necessarily a disguise? Like the artists on view, we intend to interrogate, compare, and critique, and invite you to do the same.