field guide

“And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?

And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?

And have you changed your life?”

-Mary Oliver Excerpt from The Swan

Field Guide is an exploration of the ways in which we compile and exchange knowledge that is intended to transform our experience of looking at the world. Making an introduction for us of something or someone unfamiliar, field guides move us to become familiar. They transfigure the unrecognized to the seen, the foreign to the known. In an era of ever shortening attention spans, a field guide does not only help us differentiate and identify, it helps us look, deeply, and appreciate. That attention can help us love.

This exhibition is a call for artwork that makes an offering of information, instruction, or insight that can help us identify and make known. Like compact manuals meant to be carried with us “out in the field”, this artwork should invoke new kinds of recognition to see the world and ourselves with deepening attention not just from our heads but also our hearts. Whether developed by experts or enthusiasts, that posture of attention is a field guide pertaining to everything. That is the guide through which we can discover what beauty is for, and how through it, we can be changed.