The Temporary Institute of Emancipated Objects, opening January 10th in the Philip J. Steele Gallery on the campus of the Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design, focuses its attention on the renewal of the object through use of artists’ reuse and appropriation. The four artists exhibited, Brett Windham, Barry Anderson, Humberto Duque, and Whitney Lynn, use the human-made material world around them to cull materials, inspiration, and concept form. The artists will also take part of RMCAD’s Visiting Artist, Scholar, & Designer Program and will participate on a panel discussion on the importance of failure in contemporary artmaking practices entitled, “Beg, Borrow, & Steal: 4 Contemporary Views on Failure.” The panel will take place the night of the opening and is open to the public. The object-oriented works in the exhibition can be articulated as the disruption or collapsing of the ground on which we stand and simultaneously reflect on the artist's considerable curiosity about the infinite variety of life. The goal of the works featured is not to arrive at a settled view, but to achieve greater clarity about what is really at issue, about what is really at stake in a given debate, the heterogeneous possibilities of the material world around us. Here at its most basic essence the (art)object functions as the combatant against objective reality by ungrounding the objects around us.
