Turn on the bright lights

The Ramapo Curatorial Prize exhibition Turn on the bright lights opens in the Kresge and Pascal Galleries at Ramapo College on Wednesday, November 4 with an opening reception from 5 to 7 p.m. There will be a curator and artist’s talk at 6 p.m. The exhibition continues on view through December 11.

The Ramapo Curatorial Prize is presented each year to a second-year graduate student at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. The 2014 winner was Carla Acevedo-Yates. Artists featured in the exhibition include Damien Catera, Kajsa Dahlberg, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Jason Mena, Trevor Paglen and Adán Vallecillo.

“Abstraction in the visual arts has often been misunderstood through the lens of the historical avant-garde and high modernism, whose utopian ideals of universality and humanism were intertwined with the totalizing ambitions of the social and political projects of Western modernity,” said curator Acevedo-Yates. “In contrast, the artists in the exhibition deploy abstractions – indeterminate geographies, image negation, abstracted soundscapes, and the monochrome – as a formal strategy and conceptual device to map and represent that which remains invisible.”

This project is funded in part by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Department of State, a Partner Agency of the National Endowment for the Arts.