Group Exhibition: “Intimate Confession is a Project”

Intimate confession is a project is a group exhibition that considers transmission, intergenerational life, and cultural inheritance through the prism of intimacy and infrastructure. Through the work of ten multifaceted artists spanning generations and geographies, the exhibition thinks through infrastructure as an intimate holding cell, capable of affective and affirmative power.

The title is borrowed from a sonnet line by poet Juliana Spahr and is recast to reflect on the relational infrastructures of cultural material. In recent years, a surge of scholarship on the built and unbuilt environments has emerged contrasting “humans, things, words, and non-humans into patterned conjunctures,” to quote feminist theorist Michelle Murphy. The upper galleries at the Blaffer Art Museum will serve as a conductive space for hosting — to welcome the practices of ten artists, three of them commissions, critically engaging material and immaterial histories of Houston.

Two new works by Clémence de La Tour du Pin (b. 1986, Roanne, France; lives and works in Paris and Amsterdam) approach embodied experience through scent, archive, and institutional memory. One work features an arrangement of personal archival material, propaganda material, and photographs sourced from the oil and gas industries archives within the Special Collections at the University of Houston Libraries, while the other is a series of wax casts of handmade glass bottles. The use of beeswax and sealing wax, alongside a specially produced scent containing sulfuric notes embedded within the material, extends the work’s exploration of bodily infestation to ideas of containment and the distortion of various materials.

Featured artists: Gwenneth Boelens, Benvenuto Chavajay Ixtetela, ektor garcia, Lonnie Holley, Anna Mayer, Na Mira, Kate Newby, Josie Ann Teets, Roberto Tejada, Chiffon Thomas, Iris Touliatou, Clémence de la Tour du Pin

Intimate confession is a project is accompanied by a rich public program including commissions, talks, readings, concerts, and performances in connection with a range of city-wide partners. The project is organized by guest curator and writer Jennifer Teets for the Blaffer Art Museum, growing out of Carbonate of Copper held at Artpace, San Antonio in the spring of 2022.

Opening Reception:

Friday, October 27 | 6:00pm-8:00pm 
Opening Reception—”Intimate confession is a project”
Location: Blaffer Art Museum