LOVE 2020: Perfect Vision

Opening reception: Thursday, January 30, 5-7pm
January 21- February 14, Monday - Friday 9am-5pm
Columbia University, LeRoy Neiman Gallery, 2960 Broadway, New York
More information about the exhibition here.

LOVE 2020: Perfect Vision is the third biennial LOVE exhibition at the LeRoy Neiman Gallery at Columbia University. This series of exhibitions takes the form of a lively conversation between artists across generations, mediums, backgrounds, and contexts—all responding to the question: what does LOVE look like to you right now? Artist-curator Rachel Stern manifests an immersive installation of artworks that encompasses visitors with the exquisite and overwhelming sensations of LOVE. For 2020, Perfect Vision asks participating artists to give special consideration to the ways in which both biological and psychic vision contributes to the construction of LOVE, interacting with positions of power. Considering the physical experience of viewing, the exhibition is designed to challenge the ways in which we look at artworks. Poet Paul Legault’s floor text—inspired by a map of a 1960s Montreal bathhouse—trails throughout the gallery as ambiguous and titillating labels and commands. Oren Pinhassi’s see-through urinals create an erotic architectural framework, while Emily Oliveira’s lush psychedelic rug and ottoman invite a soft, dreamlike sanctuary beneath Julie Yeo’s cloud-like floating body parts. A salon of artworks across genre and medium are framed by Bryan Jabs’ wallpaper, “Eyes without a Face”: an array of intricate, mutant eyes. LOVE is overwhelming. Here, doorways are portals through pupils and stained-glass; skylights and airplane windows open up to discordant vistas; and eyes peer out from every direction. LOVE 2020: Perfect Vision seeks to define the utterly indefinable, to name and image that which by its very nature is without form or fixed identity. 2020 feels both like an impossible future arrived too soon and a cold dead weight refusing to budge or give in to our hopes for what comes next. It is tempting to look away, but LOVE 2020: Perfect Vision says to the future, as Carly Rae Jepsen implores, “It’s hard to look right at ya baby. But here’s my number, so call me maybe?”

David Altmejd, Roni Aviv, Mario Ayala, Pablo Barba, Oona Brangam-Snell, Dana Buhl, Michael Bühler Rose, Esteban Cabeza de Baca, Nathan Catlin, Peter Clough, Sean Downey, Christina Graham, gergsnewphone, Harry Gould Harvey IV, Phoebe Hinton, Heidi Howard, Cary Hulbert, Hypercomf, Bryan Jabs, Joseph Kaplan, Luke Kendall, Jon Kessler, Paul Legault, Matthew Leifheit, Cole Lu, Paula Lycan, Alexandra Rafael Martínez, Edward Mapplethorpe, Susan Metrican, Emily Oliveira, Oren Pinhassi, LJ Roberts, Adam Liam Rose, Yoshie Sakai, Pacifico Silano, Jacqueline Silberbush, Sandra Stark, Maia Stern, Stipan Tadic, Erik Thurmond, Ika Trey, Tomas Vu, Julie Yeo