exhibition statement

Reveal-Reveal is the exhibition that lays down the gauntlet. Contemporary art is over, and artists are asking what has been hidden and kept secret all those years during which prescribed ways of thinking, feeling, and interpreting were considered legitimate and acceptable. As the tide of this dominance is now quickly receding, new openings and possibilities are emerging from the seafloor of art: to reveal is not simply to expose what was hidden but to establish new terms. Artists are now defining their own terms for what can be disclosed – through which truth, intimacy, contradiction, and human experience may emerge.

Rather than proposing an end to art, Reveal-Reveal considers the exhaustion of its current mode of contemporaneity. In its wake, the exhibition opens space for artists to renegotiate the conditions of the “image” and of image-making itself. Across painting, sculpture, installation, photography, and mixed media, the works in Reveal-Reveal unfold through acts of excavation and resistance. Layers are peeled back – narratively, emotionally, materially, psychologically – allowing moments of recognition to surface gradually, rather than all at once. The exhibition resists spectacle in favor of attentiveness, asking viewers to encounter each work as both a proposition and a process of becoming.

At a moment when inherited definitions of “contemporary art” feel increasingly insufficient, the exhibition asks what remains obscured beneath dominant aesthetic languages and cultural narratives and which new forms of expression become possible once those structures begin to recede. Reveal-Reveal brings together a group of artists whose practices confront this unstable terrain through the tensions between concealment and disclosure, certainty and doubt, surface and depth.

In a cultural landscape progressively shaped by simulation, mediation, and uncertainty, questions of authenticity have become unavoidable. What is genuine? What is constructed? Where do truth and fiction collapse into one another? The artists gathered here do not offer definitive answers. Instead, they engage these tensions directly, producing works that embrace vulnerability, ambiguity, and emotional immediacy as necessary forms of inquiry. Reveal-Reveal ultimately positions art as one of the few remaining spaces capable of holding complexity without resolution. Through gestures both intimate and confrontational, the exhibition invites viewers into an active encounter with what can be uncovered, shared, and felt – revealing not only hidden realities but new possibilities for perception itself.

Exhibition Statement Written by Todd Molinari + Mary Lai

This exhibition is supported through The Ford Family Foundation and Portland Institute for Contemporary Art.