On the Outside Looking In?

August 2024 - December 2024

Curated by Rik Hine, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Washburn University

We constantly make snap judgements about others in terms of insiders and outsiders. Sometimes we do so before words are exchanged, thus ensuring that they never are. At their worst, these verdicts can blind us to the humanity of others; to the recognition that they too are centers of meaning, worthy of love and respect.

Photographs, of course, can’t talk and have no intrinsic meaning, but those in this exhibition have been chosen for the ways in which they can help us pay attention to our pre-reflective judgements. In some sense, though, albeit it never in one voice, they ‘speak’ to the complexity of our relationships in terms of what it means to be inside or outside. From simple statements about people in space or time, to questions about why they’re so situated; from decrees about identity to complex moral questions about how we stand in relation to them. Who’s on the inside and who’s on the outside, and why? Who’s actually the looker and who’s the lookee? And should we be looking in the first instance?

Cindy Sherman, Pregnant Woman (detail), 2002, archival pigment print. Permanent collection of the Mulvane Art Museum, Washburn University.