ACQUIESCENCE — Shadows, Fruit, Metal, Salt
curated by Lucas Moran
Acquiescence — Shadows, Fruit, Metal, Salt brings together the work of Georgina Arroyo, Elizabeth Hatke, Cait McCormack, Jenna Ransom, and Lindsey Sorge in an exhibition about adaptation, negotiation, and the complicated relationship between giving in and moving forward.
Acquiescence is often understood as passive acceptance, a willingness to go along with something rather than resist it. Here, the term is considered differently: as an active way of navigating the conditions around us. To acquiesce can mean knowing when to push back, when to adjust, and when to accept what cannot be changed. It can be a means of survival, but also a means of getting somewhere.
For artists, this negotiation is inseparable from the process of making. Creative work develops through constant encounters with limitation and circumstance: materials behave unexpectedly, ideas change, failures become productive, and external pressures shape what is possible. Success, too, rarely arrives through resistance alone. It can require compromise, redirection, patience, and the willingness to let an original idea become something else.
The artists in Acquiescence approach these negotiations through distinct materials, forms, and visual languages. Across the exhibition, surfaces shift, colors collide, familiar forms become unfamiliar, and moments of softness exist alongside tension. The works do not illustrate a single definition of acquiescence, but instead consider the different ways we respond when our intentions meet the world around us.
The exhibition asks what it means to adapt without disappearing, to compromise without abandoning one's intentions, and to accept change while continuing to make something of one's own. In this sense, acquiescence is not the opposite of resistance. It is another way of moving through it.