Juror Response Form

This exhibition brings together works that consider the body as a site where intimacy, care, and violence converge. Through drawing, painting, and sculptural abstraction, touch becomes a central language—one that resists clarity and refuses to resolve into tenderness or harm alone. Hands recur as agents of contact and pressure, while bodies are fragmented, withheld, or abstracted, emphasizing sensation over narrative.

Across the exhibition, intimacy is shaped by containment. The body holds, protects, endures, and tests its own limits, whether through internal strain, self-directed touch, or contact with another. Domestic and private spaces surface not as sites of safety, but as environments where power, routine, and vulnerability intersect. The female body, often subject to eroticized viewing, is reoriented toward vigilance and self-preservation, asserting agency through restraint rather than exposure.

Rather than offering singular emotional readings, the works remain unresolved. Touch oscillates between care and threat, closeness and distance, desire and defense. In this instability, the exhibition proposes the body as a form of knowledge—one shaped by pressure, memory, and endurance—where meaning emerges through sensation long before it can be named.

For the 2026 Williams Art Community Project (WACP).

jo9@williams.edu 

Josie Overbeck Art