LACE is pleased to present I Feel Different, a multi-media group exhibition organized by guest curator Dr. Jennifer Doyle. This provocative project explores both the experience of feeling different from others and the transformative powers of emotion – to make one feel differently. The participating artists each make work about and of emotional intensity, featuring Nao Bustamante, Lezley Saar, David Wojnarowicz, Monica Duncan, Lara Odell, Susan Silton, and Niña Yhared (1814).

Los Angeles-based author and academic Jennifer Doyle examines the way in which personal feelings are often guarded in social settings and deemed inappropriate. When an artist successfully overrides the self-consciousness and the inhibitions that settle on us in social places, it comes as a shock.  Finding ourselves overwhelmed with actual emotion – crying, laughing, afraid, disgusted, aroused, and outraged – can leave us feeling more than a little naked.

The rarity and awkwardness of these kinds of encounters lie at the heart of I Feel Different. The show examines the poetics of sincerity, the pleasures and dangers of sentimentality, and the transformative powers of intense feeling. I Feel Different acknowledges that contemporary art is powerfully defined by the relationship between the art object and spectator, and claims that emotion plays a major part in this story. By focusing on artists whose work unpacks the multiple meanings of the term feeling different, Doyle draws links between a range of artists who are normally not connected, but together create an exhibition that is anything but lacking in emotion.

I Feel Different will be located in the rear gallery of LACE.