What are you afraid of?(art exhibition at intersection for the arts)

TERROR?

INTERSECTION FOR THE ARTS

SAN FRANCISCO

SEPTEMBER 11-NOVEMBER 11, 2006

Intersection for the Arts' exhibition "Terror?" opened on the fifth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks. In anticipation of renewed hysteria and sentimental media coverage surrounding this grim milestone, the exhibition attempts to take back the night on the subject of fear. It asks questions such as What is terror?, Who perpetuates it?, and How does fear control us? The exhibition's curators literally put these questions out there for people around the world to answer. In the gallery's first open call for visual art submissions in a decade, they received work from nearly twenty countries, resulting in an exhibition that includes a daunting 360 works.

The gallery required that submissions be more-or-less two dimensional and no larger than a standard sheet of paper. Aside from these criteria, artists were free to send all types of media. The show includes paintings, photographs, illustrations, graphic designs, textiles, collages, and relief sculptures. The gallery also allowed artists to submit work in electronic form, which the gallery then printed out in color. This enabled the works of artists who make large-scale work or objects that cannot be mailed--graffiti, for example--to be included. The democracy of this approach is admirable even if a few of the pieces seemed to lose something in the translation.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]