see through love

Reflecting on the exhibition’s title, the cohort notes how it describes their adoration and respect for each other, while serving as a way through which they see the world:

“The name see through love references a 1994 song by the late and precious composer Arthur Russell. Those three quick words do a compound linguistic magic in our eyes. They describe the clear, generous, and close-knit love between us and the semi-permeable membranes embodied in each of our practices. We are directed by them to see our loves through to their realization, and to continue loving past that limit. They offer a way of seeing that looks beyond love to its other side, to the periphery of love where we are haunted by unseen ghosts, where love is porous and prone to mistakes, where love is the simple and relational unit at the middle of the universe. And they remind us that love is itself a way of seeing: love is the glass lens through which the seven of us see and see each other. To see through love is to yield care from the stalks of the prairie and the glacial lakes we are surrounded by, to yield kaleidoscopic color from the heart of winter and sensuality from dreamlike abstraction. To see through love is to resist the constructs of identity and time, to recognize in time the marks that sew us up to our past, present, and future, and to celebrate the raw, unruly love that courses loudly in us. To see through love is to see with the wide-open and receptive eyes of your own heart. Like Arthur sings, “We are a see-through love / seeing through sun and haze / I see through to the totally clear end.”

That same evening as the reception, visit the Quarter Gallery for an exhibition of works by 1st and 2nd year MFA students on view concurrently with the MFA thesis exhibition.