Fields Harrington | Ahmed Hasan | Danielle Kovalski Mosonegro | Fred Schmidt-Arenales

In an essay on the artist Cady Noland, the critic Bruce Hainley asks, “What does it mean to make an issue of connection—of what kind of connection, especially when the biographical, art-historical, and political are so knotted—a question of heredity? The family is as much an aesthetic form as a political one.”

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The artists gathered in this exhibition take up this question in its many valences, addressing relatedness as a social, political, personal, and formal concern. Through video, sculpture, photography, and installation, the artists examine how ideas that we have now accepted as constructed—including science, race, family, and history—are scaffolded by linkages both secure and fragile.

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Weak Link leans into the value of precarious connections and their attendant possibilities. As the tenuous connection that often determines the strength of a system or structure, the weak link can function as a site of generative potential. We’re interested in the ability of weak links to highlight flaws and failures within structures held up by faith, and the contingency of structures on the ideas and people who form them.

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At the same time, this exhibition is an attempt to show our own hand. The group show is a format in which connection can be contested: decisions may be formally sound, or theoretically valid; they may be arbitrary, or personally motivated. They may hold water, or they may fail. In embracing the weak link, we offer the potential for connections to be fluid, rather than deterministic, and by doing so, we hope to expand our understandings of what it means to simply be together.