We humans are a bundle of nerves and flesh, and feelings. It is this last part that “Humanly Possible: The Empathy Exhibition” at MIAD touches on most pointedly, poking at our emotions from a variety of angles and drawing out our secret internal lives into the open of the art gallery.
Tina Blondell’s paintings show melancholy and stark young people with dour expressions, placed in metaphoric compositions. In Personal Space a tough-looking woman sits in a tight cube of a space. The soles of her feet are pressed together, her arms and hands extended to cover the toes of her studded boots. There is not much space in here at all, and her defensive posture fends off any incursion.
The wide-open and amorphous space of the public arena is essentially the setting for Lois Bielefeld’s Androgyny series. These are photographs of individuals of varying ages whose appearance denies easy gender categorization. Their recorded voices speak about their lives and how they have been perceived by others, with the sound of their words emanating from behind the closed door of a bathroom stall installation in the gallery.
We are asked to vicariously walk in another’s shoes in Nooshin Hakim Javadi’s Requiem 1 and Requiem 2. Both are shoes, mounted on a support panel and hung on the wall like a relief sculpture. The shoes are described as coming from a person who participated in a 2009 riot in Iran. They are partially covered by deep blue crystals growing over the surface, becoming both a memorial and tomb.
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It is not only our own species that deserves our empathy. Sue Coe offers a print series that details the sad fate of captive bears Snowflake and Szenja. For 20 years, the two were sole companions, but then separated in different zoos. Subjected to fertility procedures, depressed and lonely, the bears succumbed to an unhappy end.
“Humanly Possible: The Empathy Exhibition” asks the viewer to consider how they may place themselves in another’s position. It is art that is very much about the viewer response to our common humanity and experience.
Through March 10 at Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, 273 E. Erie St.
