ADDS DONNA is pleased to present Being There, an exhibition curated by Meg Duguid and Philip von Zweck, in which your presence is required.

Through things like social media we’re more linked now than ever, but all of that connectivity is mediated through ones and zeros sorted by bizarre algorithms which try to predict our interest level. We are both more connected but more fractured as we live through tiny screens in a world where if you don’t post a photo it didn’t happen. So much so that the photo supersedes the event. Even in art primacy is being replaced, collectors buy paintings based on jpegs and curators often do initial research on the web looking at more zeros and ones. The offer of being together in physical space doing things relationally has moved out of the way to make room for the explicitly political.

The work in Being There is steeped in implicit politic. It hinges on ideas of being in, around, with, and near the public to create a friction where life butts up against artistic action. This work is imbued with personal action containing the inherently political but not the overtly political, instead it relies on the personal and the communal to bring to it a complicated series of I’s together to create an almost-collective we. The world and structures as seen through these works capitalize on the familiar and the everyday to destabilize how space is experienced.

Closing reception and performances: January 14, 2017 from 12 – 4pm