Two recent shows examine jewelry in relationship to the body from two different but focused points of view. It is interesting to note how exhibitions featuring jewelry are beginning to narrow their curatorial approach and become more esoteric or, in other words, really speak more to the makers and intelligent collectors. It is not surprising that both of these exhibitions started out in university galleries where there is a strong professional teaching staff in the metalsmithing departments.

The first show to open this summer was the Thinking Body at the University of Oregon, which was conceived in relationship to the Olympic trials taking place in Eugene, OR. Curators Kate Wagle and Anya Kavarkis explain it this way: “Our goal is to expose the interesting aesthetic and cultural spaces that exist between the selected works, and to consider their relationship to the human body as a uniquely sentient organism with the ability to innovate and understand the world around it in new ways.” In the essay that accompanies the exhibition, Glenn Adamson goes on further to say: “The artists in the present exhibition devote themselves to this yawning gap in the expected language of the medium. In the space between the object and the body, which so often goes unnoticed, they find a zone of critical investigation.” This exhibit will be showing in San Francisco at the San Francisco Museum of Craft and Design from October 17 to January 4, 2009. There is also a panel discussion and walkthrough taking place on Saturday November 1st at 3:30- 5:30 pm. 

The second show to directly deal with the body is Equilibrium: Body As Site. It will appeared the Exhibition in Print summer issue of Metalsmith magazine. The actual show will open in El Paso, TX in the Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at The University of Texas at El Paso January 22, 2009. It features sixty-seven works by twenty contemporary artists who use jewelry as format and who engage the body as site, altering sensorial experience by impacting one or more of the five senses.

Although similar in approach, the two shows address a similar idea from two distinctly difference directions. Thinking Body is interested in how the body senses things and how jewelry and other objects are perceived by it. It could be called the neurological approach. The Equilibrium show is about the body as a site or the landscape where jewelry is at play. Although bodily senses are invoked in both there were different curatorial decisions made in each case and the relationship of jewelry to the body is food for thought for everyone interested in the medium.