We Just Fit, You and I

We Just Fit, You and Ii is a group exhibition that probes the boundaries between bodies and architecture. Featuring Michelle Lopez, Sondra Perry, Pamela Rosenkranz, and Michael E. Smith, each artist looks to contemporary technology, unexpected material behavior, and architecture as primary means by which to re-articulate the human form. 

When our surroundings increasingly reflect ourselves—from the scale of a room to our specific online preferences—the edges of “self” begin to blur.  The artists presented here use the Carpenter Center’s building as site and subject to question this boundary between bodies and space, the human and nonhuman, and ultimately, figure and ground. The works underscore the corporeal metaphors embedded in this building’s design—from the lobe-shape “lungs” of the second and third floor studios, to Le Corbusier’s figure-based “Modulor” proportional system—to redefine what can constitute bodily presence today. 

The Modulor was developed by Le Corbusier as an anthropometric scale of architectural proportions based on his concept of an idealized, male body with the height of six feet or 1.83 meters. Meant to bridge the metric and imperial measurement systems, it was emblematic of the architect’s drive to reinvest the discipline of design with its historic, humanistic underpinnings. 

We Just Fit, You and I is organized by guest curator Dina Deitsch, Director and Chief Curator, Tufts University Art Galleries and former John R. and Barbara Robinson Family Interim Director, CCVA. 

Thank you to philosopher Robin Mackay for this title, a lyric from Carly Rae Jepson’s song Super Natural, quoted in his essay “Hyperspastic-Supernormal” in Our Product: Pamela Rosenkranz, edited by Susanne Pfeffer, Koenig Books (2017).