Collection, Reframed: We Are Here, Beyond Vision

This is the inaugural presentation of the Bechtler Museum’s Collection, Reframed program, a summer exhibition series that invites contemporary artists and creative visionaries to engage with the museum’s holdings. Collection, Reframed: We are Here, Beyond Vision pairs immersive video and sound installations by artist Janet Biggs, visually impaired dancer and choreographer Davian Robinson, and a host of other collaborators including mathematicians Agnieszka Międlar and Paul Cazeaux, physicist Daniel Tapia Takaki, and spatial sound engineer Tanner Upthegrove, with works from the museum's permanent collection that reflect on the human body across varied states of form and flux.

Merging the fields of art, science, and technology, Biggs’s practice examines the thresholds of physical experience, endurance, and adaptation. The multimedia videos and newly commissioned audio works featured in the exhibition directly engage with the museum building and collection, and explore relationships between representation, communication, and sensory perception.

In dialogue with these works are selections from the museum’s holdings by Alexander Archipenko, Edgar Degas, Maja Godlewska, Barbara Hepworth, Pablo Picasso, and other modern and contemporary artists who revolutionized ways of portraying the human figure. Together with Biggs’s compelling installations, these works demonstrate continually shifting perspectives towards bodily difference and possibility.