Smack Mellon

In the relationship between aesthetics and politics, there is always a risk of falling into the gap between the personal and the communal. Art, and by extension aesthetics, is often discussed as a highly personal, radically individualized form of expression while politics is, by necessity, a force of society that seeks solutions to shared interests. But perhaps this contradiction has been overstated, as it is generally accepted that any art, regardless of its intentions, necessarily takes a political stance by either conforming to or protesting against established systems of power and value. So if the political is necessarily unavoidable, what is the role of an aesthetic that consciously allies itself with the resistance to hegemonic powers? What does it look like, how does it operate, and who is a part of it? The Hollow Center takes such questions as its impetus, featuring recent works by artists that seek both an historical account of and a future potential for a potent aesthetics of resistance.