New Harmony Gallery hosts exhibition, Describing Language: Thinking Through Access and Communication

The New Harmony Gallery of Contemporary Art's latest exhibition, Describing Language: Thinking Through Access and Communication is currently on display through Saturday, October 2.

The exhibition will end with a virtual open conversation with artists, curators, and researchers at 3 p.m. Saturday, October 2. A link for the talk will be posted closer to the event date.

Artists participating in the exhibition are: Farhad Bahram, Jodie Cavalier, Jovencio de la Paz, Tannaz Farsi, Christine Laurin Miller, Warren Miller, Alyson Provax, Josie Love Roebuck, Xia Zhang and Yuyang Zhang. Profiles for each artist can be found on the NHCGA website.

The way someone can communicate to another person can be the point where they can access their needs, wants, or desires. So often, miscommunication can deny people resources and opportunities. Describing Language, a partnership with the University of Oregon's Center for Artistic Research, serves as both an exhibition and a laboratory for examining how language and other methods of communication allow or deny access.

Describing Language includes artists from both the Midwest and the West, illustrating the ways in which technology allows us to communicate and collaborate across distances and in differing environments. The featured artists address varied issues including global language and patterns of colonization, semiotics, education, propaganda, resistance, technology, ableism, emotion, labor, and identity, which all converge in an examination around access and power. Serving as points of entry for community discussion and investigation, Describing Language is malleable and changing, inviting other examples, experiences, and learning opportunities around the theme of communication and access. 

The participating artists and the NHGCA wish to acknowledge and honor the Indigenous communities native to this region, recognize that the University of Southern Indiana was built on unceded Indigenous homelands and resources, and recognize the Kickapoo, Kaskaskia, Osage, Shawnee, Myaamia, and O-ga-xpa Ma-zho people as past, present, and future caretakers of this land.

The New Harmony Gallery of Contemporary Art promotes discourse about and access to contemporary art in the southern Indiana region and is an outreach partner of the University of Southern Indiana. The gallery is located at 506 Main Street in New Harmony, Indiana. Regular hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. For more information, call 812-682-3156 or go to USI.edu/nhgallery.

For more information about the New Harmony Gallery of Contemporary Art, contact Erin McCracken Merris, Marketing Specialist for USI Outreach and Engagement, at emccracken@usi.edu.