Sublime Embrace

  Thought Forms Tony Oursler

If you happen to anywhere near the Art gallery of Hamilton Ontario, you might like to see the current exhibition curated by Shirley Madill: Sublime Embrace: Experiencing Consciousness in Contemporary Art. It looks like a really interesting show, and features work by some of my favorite artists:

Ernesto Neto (Brazil), Janet Cardiff and Georges Bures Miller (Germany, Canada), Bill Viola (USA David Rokeby (Canada), Toni Oursler (USA), , Anish Kapoor and Mark Karasick (Great Britain).
And some that I don’t know at all:

Annika Larsson (Sweden), Barbara Steinman (Canada), James Casebere (USA), Tania Bruguera (Cuba), Katarina Matiasek (Austria), David Hoffos (Canada), Miroslaw Balka (Poland), Robert Longo (USA).

In the description of the show, Madill (at least I presume it is the curator who says this)  says that

“it is a concerted exploration of the theme of consciousness in art, bringing together an international spectrum of work that engenders a visceral sensation of conscious experience. Since the nineteenth century, consciousness has been arguably the primary subject of Western art – shifting artists’ goals from direct representation of seen reality to the expression of felt experience. In the past few years this exploration has become much more focused and fueled in part by scientific and technological discoveries.  “

I would be most interested to know whether the viewer does indeed feel a “visceral sensation of conscious experience”, so please let me know if you go and if you have a conscious experience that is different from being awake and walking down the street.