From the Advanced Portfolio Class at the Mizzou School of Visual Studies, the exhibition “Making Contact” will be on display at the Josephine Gallery in the Fine Arts Building at the University of Missouri from October 24-November 15, 2023. The works featured come from five student artists– Natalie Anglen, Sophie Froese, Krislyn ‘Ken’ Hollis, Madolyn Jewell, and Caroline Topham– and centers the idea of touch and the relationship between art and viewer. Gaze, desire, and connection interweave as each work invites the viewer to engage actively, whether through interpretation or physical interaction.

The increasingly digitized, compartmentalized, abstracted world gives us endless opportunities to retreat from the undeniable realities of touch. “Making Contact” rejects the impulse to detach by calling us back to touch, to affirm the possibilities of the physical, to reconnect with what it means to be a body that affects and is affected by the world.