(The following is a copy of the curatorial statement for the "Something is Happening" gallery)

Something is Happening: Digital Prints and Photo Books

This show is not for you, viewer. It is for us. We were born from the washed up, gleaming heap of the mid-2000s, and this is our home. These photographs are the product of a consciousness simultaneously independent and merged, merged by the electronic circuitry built into the pockets of our jeans and our fingertips.

Don’t touch the art!

The moments in these photographs never existed to any perspective other than that of a machine. They are brought forth to your warm, gooey eyeballs by the fragmented world of digital bits – two-dimensional tracts of light that sear the channels of laughter and delight, compassion and despair into your eye-canals and through your nervous system to the brain. Are you hungry? There are snacks outside. Will you spend more time eating, or looking at our photographs?

We don’t care. These images are for us. This show is not for you, viewer.

However, these snacks are. Consume! Consume and understand sweet potato wafers and chocolate meats. Are our photographs blemishes on an otherwise pristine wall?

           

There is beauty here, viewer. Beyond Chips, beyond the sugary scum called Pop. Gaze at these images: that is all we ask. Gaze at them and forget yourself, forget the world you come from, and remember only that the signals you are born from are not so different from the signals that compose these images.

           

If you came for the Pretzels, the Hummus, the Baba Ghanoush alone, by all means, Eat! Then gaze. Gaze with a full belly and let the perfect, permanent pictures fixed to the walls envelop you; your full belly and your empty mind.

But!! Judge not too quickly! Are any of these images upside-down? Are you sure that one is your favorite? Turn around, look at the image on the opposing wall, and turn around again. Ask your friends their opinions. Odds are, they know more about what art is than you do.

Do you understand, viewer? These rectangular fragments of our world are not put on the wall for your entertainment. They are fixed to these third-floor Mudd surfaces to prove the worth of the world we live in.

Eat, then gaze. This show is for you, viewer.