Gittins Gallery, October 3 – 21, 2022
Artist Talk October 17 at 4:30pm in ART 158
Intuitive Survey is an exhibition of Jensen’s community-centered arts project that focuses on the contemporary creation of knowledge surrounding cultural heritage and the material past at the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Bat in the Sultanate of Oman. This exhibition shares the process of how knowledge about the cultural landscape of Bat was examined and created through an intuitively-led exploration of place, arts integration, and object-oriented ontology between the Bat Archaeological Project and the local communities of Bat. The work is an examination of personal identity and the changes that take place in our historical and contemporary perspectives of self and community when we create a third space that challenges long-held inherited views and beliefs and what can become possible through the manifestation of questions and research as collaborative art, rather than didactic data.
Overall, the show invites the viewer to follow the journey of an intuitive shift in perspective and place, purposefully sharing the complex story of how the artist (as a researcher and outsider) collaborated at a community level to generate questions and create knowledge. The show is designed to create questions about how to inspire human connections by exploring the human experiences of arid cultural landscapes. How do we teach the past when it exists differently at various individual, societal, and landscape scales? Who can we rely on to find truth? How do we model these conflicts as teachers within and beyond community contexts? The objects and images shown attempt to center the experiences of humans on the edges of knowledge creation in cultural exchanges, either because they have emerging questions about their own pasts or because they want to know why anyone else (aka, a stranger from across the world) would be curious enough to come to survey it for themselves.