Manifest Gallery - Private Space International Call

The Cincinnati based non-profit arts organization and gallery, Manifest, invites visual artists and designers to submit original works of art about secrets, surveillance, solitude, and the tension between openness and over-exposure.

Can you keep a secret?

We are encouraged to share so much of ourselves now, beyond the normal work of cultivating levels of intimacy through communion with friends, family, workmates, and neighbors.

Artists are used to this, to a point. We make a work of art, which acts not only as a piece of self-expression, but necessarily as a meeting place for viewers to experience and be affected by what we made, by who they saw it with. The act of making art is highly personal, highly intimate, but its second life requires that it be shared, made public. That it be shown.

In this case, we control what we share and how much we abstract. And yet, beyond our work, we and the rest of the world are asked to give more. We post pictures, publicly celebrate birthdays, wear our political stances in identifiable and categorizable ways. This is only what we give voluntarily, not the information gleaned from our simple participation in society. Yet we share in the process of making ourselves, our lives, into data. How personalized are your ads? The coupons the grocery sends you? Who can access what is on your phone?

Does this openness make you happier? Safer? More successful? Do you feel connected?

It takes effort now to keep secrets, and to carve out a place to be unobserved.

$40 for up to FOUR entries submitted. $5 per each additional entry.