​Saya Moriyasu and Charles Tung

Assistant Professor, English and Women’s Studies, Seattle University

for the Hedreen Gallery at Seattle University

January – March, 2010

What makes an intellectual? What is the basis of property? What is the relationship between the life of the mind and the sensual world?

Curator Yoko Ott and artist Matthew Offenbacher teamed up to investigate the aesthetic power of objects and ideas in the lives of artists, curators, and university professors by carefully pairing thirteen artists with thirteen professional thinkers. The artists were asked to visit their assigned person’s workplace, engage them in conversation, and select several things to borrow for the duration of the exhibition. The objects brought back from these expeditions—tools, raw materials, décor, texts, and other (harder to classify) items—have been installed by the artists in a setting especially designed by Ott and Offenbacher. The resulting exhibition is a hands-on database: a non-hierarchical collection of objects available for reading, touching, and looking.

photo credit Saya Moriyasu