Image by bryant terry

The limits of language are the limits of my world. –Wittgenstein

No single word in the English language adequately characterizes this moment, so the MFA class of 2025 coined and defined the word Collapsense. This naming recognizes power and precarity in the time of ecological and political crises, and it inaugurates the annual Spring First Year Graduate Student exhibit. On view at the Worth Ryder Art Gallery are heterogenous objects and gestures elucidating collapsense and expanding the limits of our world.

The six artists whose work shapes, defines, and encompasses the show’s titular portmanteau Collapsense all uniquely grapple with this newly fused term; however, each artist uses this coming apart and collision of sense(s) to connect to throughlines of the sensing body and the ground. The artists in this exhibition… work across a range of media from sound installation to sculpture to oil painting in ways that explore culturally, regionally, and politically specific themes while each engaging with the presence of the ground as a conceptual touchstone. The artists marshal ground in a multitude of meanings: ground as soil, surface, a place of access and inaccessibility, a space to gather or inhabit, a site of decay, and a respite from which growth occurs. In the midst of these explorations of the simultaneity of death and growth in the ground, these artists each highlight the body in its multisensory capacity, considering how senses can interweave and overlap, coherence can break down, and somatic experience and perception can work with and against one another.

– From Madeleine Morris, Collapsense (exhibition catalog essay), 2024

In addition to their work in the 1st Year MFA Show, Zekarias Musele Thompson will be presenting their work ad infinitum (Fuck John J Clark) at CNMAT on Wednesday, January 25th, 7 - 9 pm and Sunday, February 11th, 4 - 6 pm.