The Other

Another person is never fully given to us. We see their surface, their gesture, but not the interior experience producing it, and what we build in its place is an educated guess: a sense that there is a "someone" there, even though we can't verify it from the inside. The philosopher Edmund Husserl called this reaching toward another person's inaccessible experience "appresentation." The Other extends this problem into the history of artistic practice, looking toward moments and models in which self-expression was not the primary aim of the work, and where communal values, collective meaning, ritual, or dialogue took precedence over an individual artist's statement. The artists in the exhibition take up this inheritance directly. Some engage the idea of the other as subject matter. Others actively collaborate with another artist, practice, or set of hands as part of the work's method, letting the boundary of the individual author blur.