Drifting Toward the Names of Things: New work by Brian T. Leahy, opens July 25 at Urban Dharma

From a press release:

Drifting Toward the Names of Things: New work by Brian T. Leahy, opens July 25 at Urban Dharma

Reception Friday, July 25th, 6-8pm
On view July 25th-October, 2014
Urban Dharma, 29 Page Ave, Asheville NC

A Chicago-based artist with strong ties to Asheville, Brian T. Leahy creates interdisciplinary art works that challenge static perceptions of identities and their boundaries.  In Drifting Toward the Names of Things, Leahy adopts the concept of ‘semantic saturation’ as a tool to test the range and limitations of his sense of self.  The installation of these works on paper at Urban Dharma, a Buddhist community space and temple in downtown, draws parallels between artistic and Buddhist practices, and attempts to provide a resource for conversation and relationship within Urban Dharma and the Asheville community at large.

Semantic saturation, or semantic satiation, is the psychological term for the phenomenon in which a word is repeated until it seems meaningless and the sound of the word becomes strange and unfamiliar.  By experimenting with the verbal and visual repetition of words and phrases that are closely tied to our sense of self (I am, I would, I could, I should), Leahy attempts to experience both these phrases and the selfhood they invoke as meaningless and unfamiliar, much like the verbal results of semantic saturation.  These experiments, and their visual results, relate to methods and practices of mantra recitation, a significant correlation due to the particular context of these works at Urban Dharma.

Leahy is a graduate of Davidson College (BA in Studio Art and Religious Studies) and a current masters candidate at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Modern and Contemporary Art History, Theory, and Criticism.  No stranger to Urban Dharma, he was an active early community and staff member.  His curatorial practice has focused on the intersection of pedagogy, community, and exhibition making, while his research and writing interests include socially engaged art forms, the relationship between art and everyday life, and the valuation of work within artistic practices.