The Name is the Guest of the The Substance

A Thesis Exhibit by Jessica Scott
March 30th-April 6th, 2022
Opening Performance March 30th, at 6 - 8 pm: Reserve a seat here
At 6:30pm the gallery will open to everyone for post-performance viewing

The Name is a Guest of the Substance brings together works of video, installation, live performance, sculpture and print to investigate the constructions of kinship which organize us into the world as historical, ecological and political subjects. Herter Gallery’s 1600 sq. ft space is utilized in full for the exhibit. The West Room features works inspired by the biographies of my grandfather, sisters and mother alongside my own autobiographical prose, tracing how state intervention influences familial narratives and questioning the extent to which we can intervene on those narratives from the present.

The work in the East Room invites the audience to consider their entanglements with the more-than-human world as they manifest in local interspecies relationships and in our personal ideologies. As a whole, this exhibit explores the limits of contemporary systems of rigid categorization and the impact of the power dynamics they enforce, encouraging different ways of identifying within our overlapping local, global and biological communities. 

This exhibition was made possible with generous support from the Amherst Cultural Council, UMass Fine Arts Council and the College of Humanities and Fine Arts.