Gates, fences, windows, and walls are mundane and monumental barrier architectures designed to separate, enclose, protect, or distance. The 12 artists whose work is on view in ArtYard’s exhibition Barrier engage with these architectures — and more — with the aim of revealing and renegotiating their power.
Through mixed media approaches, including sculpture, installation, video, painting, and works on paper, the featured selections engage themes of property and public space, geopolitical volatility, ecology and the built world, materiality, memory, and diaspora. Several works speak of displacement as a place.
The works posit barriers as porous portals, evoking Angela Davis’s transformative abolitionist vision that “walls turned sideways are bridges” as they seek to expand possibilities for connection through and beyond infrastructures designed to disconnect, serving as lenses into psychic space, buried histories, political crises, ecological and familial relationships, and play.
Barrier is curated by Kaitlin Pomerantz and Lucia Thomé and features work by Sandra SK Amoabeng, Matthew Colaizzo, Ghida Dalloul, FORTUNE, Rami George, David L. Johnson, Naomieh Jovin, Zach Ozma, Pallavi Sen, Ivanco Talevski, Kristen Neville Taylor, and Levester Williams.
Also on view at ArtYard is Unfinished Verses, an exhibition exploring the intricacies and ongoing nature of the creative process by presenting sketchbooks by 10 contemporary artists. Visible through small apertures in specially made looking devices, the sketchbooks are turned regularly to reveal new pages, shown one at a time, over the show’s three-month span.
Barrier continues through January 26, 2025, at ArtYard, located at 13 Front Street in Frenchtown, New Jersey. Public hours are Wednesday through Sunday, 11am to 5pm, and until 7pm on Thursdays.
To learn more, visit artyard.org.
ArtYard is an incubator for creative expression and a catalyst for collaborations that reveal the transformational power of art. Its campus includes an arts center featuring exhibition space and a state-of-the-art theater as well as two buildings housing its residency program.
