This Skin of Ours: Miller ICA, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA

We sense the world through this skin of ours. It is the surface that brokers our relationship to external forces and translates them as pain or pleasure. This organ gives each of us an identifiable shape, on which accrues a lifetime of experiences. With its distinct tone and texture, the skin is perhaps where we most frequently deposit ideas of the self and the other. We test the limits of our physical selves through contact—violence and intimacy both necessitate that our skins touch and communicate. If the skin is a site of injuries and insults that each body has had to bear, it is also a site of potential repair. A scar suggests both past violence and the body’s capacity to enclose the lips of a wound.

The skin is also a site of a formal investigation. It is a medium—an elastic and responsive layer—through which the artists grouped here explore pain and hurt, redemptive possibilities of healing, and the meeting of private and public lives. Imagine that the works in the exhibition comprise a collective sensing organ, pulsing with colors and texture. Imagine also this organ’s capacity to feel and empathize the pain of others as well as the pleasure from tender touch. This is a proposal to collectively feel our way through this world where we will inevitably emerge scarred, but in the shared experiences that allow for a deeper understanding of the other.