Usually, if you told me the two phrases — body parts, college students — I would have some sort of spring breaky, Girls Gone Wild (oh hey dude, you’re in jail now!) image in my head. But Exquisite Corpus, this year’s History of Art Majors’ Society exhibition, is proof that we college students, or at least our peers, have an awareness of the body and its parts that extends beyond the obvious into the various ways it can be displayed in art.
The HAMS exhibition was put together by nine History of Art majors, who chose and displayed each piece, and wrote accompanying essays for each piece, discussing art and the body “[in] regard to pleasure, objecthood, minimalism, privacy, and technology.” Each piece is a deliberation on the human body, not as a sum, but of its parts; a “reminder” (in the words of the student curators) that we can “never perceive [our] bod[ies] in the way [they] exist in the real world.”
So yeah, not really Girls Gone Wild, but still (and perhaps more) completely worth a look.
Exquisite Corpus is opening at the Johnson on Saturday from 5 – 7 p.m. in conjunction with the opening reception for their spring exhibitions, and is running until June 15th.