- Claire Sammut
Stress implies pressure. It demands, exerts, snaps and splinters. Stress is felt in the body and seen in materials that wear over time. Glass shatters with blunt force, ligaments tear with tension, wood splits, and bones break.
DISTRESS TOLERANCE presents works by seven artists who draw on concepts of durability and model ways of enduring exposure to continued strain. The exhibition title borrows a clinical term used to describe a person’s ability to tolerate moments of emotional distress, as first presented in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, a therapeutic practice developed by Dr. Marsha Linehan in the late 1970s.
From a hanging work that explores abstraction through the use of industrial materials to a sculptural assemblage in which soap cast evokes bodily decay, the pieces on view consider thresholds of exposure, asking what possibilities these processes hold for reflecting on the psychological and embodied aspects of stress.
The exhibition includes works by Bri Williams, Mona Hatoum, Brittni Ann Harvey, Rodney McMillian, Shannon Cartier Lucy, Janine Antoni, and Bryce Kroll.
With support from the OSUN Center for Human Rights & the Arts at Bard.
