Tag: Non/phenomenalities

EXTRA/PHENOMENALITIES — Stanford Art Gallery — Opening Jan. 22, 2026

EXTRA/PHENOMENALITIES
January 22–March 13, 2026
Stanford Art Gallery

OPENING RECEPTION: Thursday, January 22, 5-7pm

What are the limits of experience? This exhibition explores forms of appearance that press against the edges of perception—phenomena that are felt only indirectly, sensed as traces, intensities, or disturbances rather than as stable objects. “Extra/phenomenality” refers to this ambiguous zone of surplus and slippage: where aspects of the world exceed or elude our usual modes of noticing, while still shaping how we see, feel, and understand.

Such excess takes many forms. It can be found in natural processes whose scales outrun human attention; in cultural and spiritual traditions that treat appearance as layered or illusory; in psychological or bodily states that strain the coherence of conscious experience. It also takes shape in today’s technical environments—where images, signals, and decisions circulate through systems that operate faster than we can perceive. New modes of appearance are at stake, but also new zones of non-appearance—gaps, blind spots, and operations that remain perceptually inaccessible. In all of these cases, the limits of experience are stretched and reconfigured.

The artists gathered here engage this terrain of extension and attenuation. Some work with subtle shifts of color, rhythm, or material to draw attention to thresholds where perception begins to blur. Others stage encounters with forms that flicker between visibility and invisibility, inviting viewers to sense what hovers at experience’s margins. Still others explore how contemporary computational systems generate patterns that enter our lives without ever presenting themselves directly.

Taken together, the works invite reflection on how the phenomenal world is never given all at once, but is continually inflected by forces that lie just beyond phenomenality itself. EXTRA/PHENOMENALITIES asks viewers to slow down, to look again, and to inhabit the unstable relation between what appears and what exceeds appearing—an aesthetic space where the subtle, the oblique, and the barely perceptible can take on new significance.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:
Morehshin Allahyari, Mark Amerika, Will Luers, & Chad Mossholder, Brett Amory, Rebecca Baron + Douglas Goodwin, Jon Bernson, Daniel Brickman, Paul DeMarinis, Karin + Shane Denson, Ebti, Frank Floyd, Gabriel Harrison, DJ Meisner, Joshua Moreno, Carlo Nasisse, Miguel Novelo, Andy Rappaport, William Tremblay, Camille Utterback, and Kristen Wong

CURATED BY:
Brett Amory, Karin Denson, and Shane Denson

VISITOR INFORMATION: 
Stanford Art Gallery is located at 419 Lasuen Mall, off Palm Drive. The gallery is open Monday–Friday, 12–5pm (except on opening day, Jan. 22), and will be closed Presidents’ Day (Monday, Feb. 16). Visitor parking is available in designated areas and payment is managed through ParkMobile (free after 4pm, except by the Oval). Alternatively, take the Caltrain to Palo Alto Transit Center and hop on the free Stanford Marguerite Shuttle. This exhibition is open to Stanford affiliates and the general public. Admission is free. 

More info here: https://art.stanford.edu/events/extraphenomenalities

NON/PHENOMENALITIES — July 26 – Aug 30, 2025 at Gallery 120710 in Berkeley

NON/PHENOMENALITIES — a show that I am co-curating with artist Brett Amory at Gallery 120710 in Berkeley — opens July 26 with an amazing lineup of artists.

The title of this exhibition plays on the multiple senses of the “phenomenal.” On the one hand, the phenomenal is equated with spectacle and the spectacular, the exceptional appearance that dazzles its audience, like a pop phenomenon. On the other hand, phenomenality refers to the way anything whatsoever appears to our embodied senses; this less extravagant sense of the word “phenomenon” is at the heart of phenomenology and Kantian philosophy (where it is opposed to the noumenal, which can never appear to sensation).

Both senses of the phenomenal are contested and reconfigured in the contemporary networks of computational media and machine-learning algorithms. For example, AI produces a steady stream of spectacles, each more spectacular than the last, but the underlying operations are immune to human perception. In this interplay, not only the objects of perception but also the very conditions of experience are up for grabs. The phenomenal itself is conditioned by a new realm of nonphenomenality, which poses a special challenge for artists working with these new technologies.

As a way of approaching this new situation, we look to works that stage multiple aesthetic inversions of the phenomenal, ranging from the subtle or understated to the invisible. What comes to the fore when vision encounters computation’s resistance to consciousness, its “discorrelation” from the phenomenology of embodied experience? How can we perceive what artist Trevor Paglen has dubbed the “invisible images” that populate our world? And how can these inversions connect with or be illuminated by other traditions of the non/ phenomenal—for example Buddhist ideas of appearance as illusion, the Lacanian notion of the unperceived Real, or neuroscientific theories of consciousness as a nonsubstantial epiphenomenon?

Looking beyond the spectacles of contemporary technology, Non/phenomenalities asks us to imagine an aesthetics of the subtle, the muted, the “barely perceptible difference,” maybe even the boring.