Prepare to explore the body’s relationship to the senses! Rather than defining the senses as normally limited to five—touch, sight, hearing, taste, smell—we want to extend the public’s understanding into the areas of proprioceptive and vestibular systems. Proprioception refers to the complex approach that we use to navigate the world without sight. It informs our body’s positionality in space. For example, our hands, without being directed, are led to draw or write by our eyes. Or some of our everyday, seemingly automatic, activities are proprioceptively driven like grooming (brushing or combing our hair, washing our face or back), or playing (catching or kicking a ball). In contrast, our vestibular system provides us with a sense of balance: it informs our reactions to rapid changes in movement.  It also coordinates our sense of balance in concert with the unexpected forces of gravity. Senseless! invites exhibition-visitors to enter a series of “sensory stations” that address the complexity of these systems. Audience members will experience the topsy turvy, and indeed challenging, worlds that might be produced if one of our “senses” was suddenly taken from us. Senseless! also attempts to address more complex discussions in contemporary Disability Studies, moving beyond older discourses in which the “senses” were downplayed in order to avoid the exoticization of Othered bodies. Senseless! embraces auditory, tactile, olfactory, and the more obscure studies of proprioceptive and vestibular systems by challenging the Western, dominant domain of vision as a way of experiencing the world. Senseless! encourages exhibition-participants to use “vision” in unexpected, subversive ways that move beyond the omniscient, often Othering machines of the ocular.

Opening Reception/ Sensory Party/ Friday, December 8 from 6-9pm (running through Saturday & Sunday, December 9-10, 12-5pm)

An OtherWorldly Exhibition Organized by Tobi Aina, Tingting Cheng, Skyler Hu, Julie Kim, Angela Lin, Omer Raz, Pheht Salcido, Cole Savitz-Vogel, Alison Zheng

Special Thanks to: The Frame Gallery, Cash Ragona, Heather Hershberger, The School of Art @Carnegie Mellon University, Flyspace Productions