Dear Winthrop Students:
Let me start this off by saying as a gallerist I think a lot about space. I think about corners and
ceiling heights. I think about doors and walls. I consider what it means to embody an
experience. And space, if anything, is both absent and evermore present in my current COVID-
19 reality.

At the beginning of Poetics of Space, French philosopher Gaston Bachelard says the
phenomenologist, “takes the image just as it is, just as the poet created it, and tries to make it
his own, to feed on this rare fruit. He brings the image to the very limit of what he is able to
imagine. However far from being a poet he himself may be, he tries to repeat its creation for
himself, and if possible, continue its exaggeration.”

As I sit here in my home studio, I am feeding on the rare fruit that is the work you’ve submitted
to the 32nd Undergraduate Juried Exhibition. I’ve taken into consideration the final medium of
each work. For example, a video is not necessarily a video. Some are documentation of
performance or 3D works, while others are indeed meant to be films. Scale is also missing on
my computer screen. And I confess that I miss the experience of physically sharing space with
your work. That all this can go on virtually is a testament to the necessity art holds in our lives,
but the absence of art and its silence is also notable.

Thank you for taking the time and care to document your work. A number of awards went to
pieces that need to be experienced in person and I used the documentation video to ‘continue
the exaggeration’. I would encourage you to keep creating, however that presents itself and not
get caught up in needing this or needing that – which includes needing a physical audience.
Instead, I’d like to propose that in the absence of audience one might be willing to take more
risks, experience more failures, make more things.
Congratulations to all of you and be well.

Warmest Wishes,
Caitlin Margaret Kelly