COMMUNICATING VESSELS curated by Claudia Rousseau, PhD
January 25 - March 15, 2020
The American University Museum, Washington, DC
The title of this exhibition is borrowed from that of a book written in 1932 by Surrealist poet André Breton (1896-1966), who in turn had borrowed it from a scientific experiment of the same name. The experiment shows that in two vessels joined by a tube, a gas or liquid passing from one to the other rises to the same level, whatever the shape of the vessel. For Breton, the phrase refers to the artist, whether literary or visual, whose work results from communication between the inner life of the mind, emotions and dreams, and the waking perception of the exterior world. The three artists in this exhibition all work from this premise, although with individual styles and imagery. While their work shows continuity with Surrealist ideas of the 1930s and 40s, it also relates to the Chicago Imagists of the 1960s and 70s, reflecting the prevalence of surrealist imagery in contemporary visual art.
A catalog with essays by curator Claudia Rousseau accompanies this exhibition and is available at The American University Museum.
Catalog excerpt:
“Harrison’s own upbringing had included a Russian grandmother who taught her how to sew on an old treadle machine, instilling in her a love of textiles and decorative patterns that would give her a lifelong inclination towards using pattern in her work. Her enduring love of music is another source for this. Listening to jazz and other contemporary forms as she works, Harrison hears the patterns in them as design layers which she translates into the forms of her paintings. Although her sources do include the Chicago Imagists, comics, and contemporary design, her art comes from a deeper place. She has expressed an enduring connection to the European Surrealists who, she has said “worked without regard for convention and favored the interplay of conscious reality and subconscious dreams in their work.”