Catalyst Salon: A Conversation About Conversation

Emily Eveleth and Deborah Davidson

Sunday June 23, 2019, 7:30 – 8:30pm
Lesley Art + Design
Porter Campus, University Hall
Lower Level Screening Room
1815 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA 02140

Painter and MFA program mentor Emily Eveleth and Lesley faculty and Director of Catalyst Conversations Deborah Davidson have been in conversation in various ways for several years. They worked together on a program On Beauty, held at the Broad Institute, where Emily engaged in that topic with Google researcher David Tester. Revisit their conversation. This program inspired an exhibit at the Suffolk University Gallery, We Dream: Beauty Beyond and Beneath, a group exhibition that continued examining the idea with works that tackled the fraught issues around beauty and art objects that were in fact beautiful. 
 
On June 23rd, 2019, Davidson and Eveleth addressed the many ways that the notion of conversation plays out in making art, and the importance of communicating the ideas held in the work. As an artist, one is in conversation with ideas, materials, both contemporary and historical contexts, with other works in an exhibit, the venue that hosts the works, and importantly - in dialogue with previous work, ie contributing to the arc of the work itself. For the purposes of the program, the notion of temporality addressed the difference between a conversation that only exists in the moment, versus a conversation embodied by an object, especially an art object.