Art sometimes seems to appear out of thin air. From the vantage of the audience, It can seem as if the ideas behind the art they’re viewing appeared magically, it’s thoroughly thought out, and executed without effort. What they don’t often realize is that in many cases, endless hours has gone into research and thinking through the ideas. The Things We Don’t Know highlights a collection of artists whose research is at the core of their work and the base of their creative process. The show makes visible the ways that these artists use their work as an alternative to writing a research paper and a way to showcase their findings in creative and innovative ways. 

In an age that is constantly out with the old and in with the new, we still present and view research in the same formal essay paper style. The Things We Don’t Know is meant to challenge what is considered research and what is viewed as a reliable source of information. What does it mean to make a work of art? What are you learning from the work? From the artist? From being a viewer? 

This online exhibition showcases the work from Rachel Rose, Amor Munoz, Sharon Hayes, and Flynn Forester. Rachel Rose uses her work to explore different experiences of her life and researches them further. In her work Everything and More she took the experience of going to see the movie Gravity in theaters and having a dissociative episode afterwards into a work of art that encapsulates the experience she had after seeing the film. For the work, she interviewed an astronaut about their experiences of going into space and how it felt to return back home and grapple with mortality at the scale from which the earth seems like a marble. Amor Munoz gives jobs to those in need and allows them to learn useful skills that are transferred back to their homes and communities. Munoz teaches women from around the community about circuits and textiles and through the workshops she provides while also collecting materials for large scale works of art. Sharon Hayes connects the past with the present using queer love as a vessel. She repurposes political texts, creating a discourse with modern struggle and queer political activism. Flynn Forester has had to learn how to navigate bathrooms and through his work, Pissed Reimaged, displays the endless hours spent researching how to be trans and the sacrifices they go through to have this knowledge. Learning you’re transgender is not something that just happens, its something that is discovered, researched, tested, theorized over, and proved through experimentation and time.