Intimate confession is a project, art by Josie Ann Teets,Oil King Buggie, 1975

Josie Ann Teets, The Oil King Buggie, 1975. Pen on paper, 8 x 10 inches, 2 pages framed.
Image courtesy of Artpace, San Antonio, from the exhibition Carbonate of Copper curated by Jennifer Teets, 2022. Photos by Beth Devillier.

Intimate confession is a project


October 27, 2023—March 10, 2024


Supported by:


Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts
Villa Albertine Logo

Supported in part by Etant donnés Contemporary Art, a program of Villa Albertine


Mondriaan Fund
Image

Intimate confession is a project is a group exhibition that considers transmission, intergenerational life, and cultural inheritance through the prism of intimacy and infrastructure. Through the work of eleven artists spanning generations and geographies, the exhibition thinks through infrastructure as an intimate holding cell, capable of affective and affirmative power.

The title is borrowed from a sonnet line by poet Juliana Spahr, and is recast to reflect on the relational infrastructures of cultural material. In recent years, a surge of scholarship on the built and unbuilt environments has emerged contrasting “humans, things, words, and non-humans into patterned conjunctures,” to quote feminist theorist Michelle Murphy. This exhibition examines how infrastructures can be understood as “affective” in their varied expressions of movement and imprint on cultural life.

The exhibition includes commissions and site-specific projects that expand on material and immaterial histories of Houston. At times they refer to the unique context of the Blaffer, connecting art to other fields of knowledge and experience.

Intimate confession is a project is accompanied by a rich public program featuring talks, readings, concerts, and performances in connection with a range of citywide and institutional partners across the exhibition’s six-month run, including Basket Books & Art, the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation Collection, Institute for Global Engagement, Institute for Research on Women, Gender & Sexuality, Project Row Houses, and UH School of Art.

The Intimate confession is a project exhibition and programs are organized by guest curator Jennifer Teets.

Title and vinyl design by Julie Héneault. Exhibition design by Vassiliki Holeva.


Gwenneth Boelens
Benvenuto Chavajay Ixtetelá
ektor garcia
Lonnie Holley
Anna Mayer
Na Mira
Kate Newby
Josie Ann Teets
Chiffon Thomas
Iris Touliatou
Clémence de La Tour du Pin

 


Exhibition Videos


Exhibition Brochure

Intimate confession is a project | Exhibition Brochure

published by Blaffer Art Museum

Intimate confession is a project is a group exhibition that considers transmission, intergenerational life, and cultural inheritance through the prism of intimacy and infrastructure. The juxtaposition of “intimacy” and “infrastructure” as the theme for an exhibition might seem paradoxical: Infrastructure is, by definition, composed of material and immaterial relations that interchange or express movement. It’s the structures that make society operate (government, education, hospitals, power stations, cables, pipelines, etc.) and it enables, sustains, and/or enhances societal living conditions—until it ruptures. Intimacy, on the other hand, is a term of unbound meaning. It is a synonym for proximity or close relations. Intimate relations imply affect, or a looking inward, often embodied, private, and psychological. And yet, these two rubrics have been together animating conversations around relational life as of late, especially in the work of a number of artists.

Exhibition Images