Across painting, sculpture, and installation, Soft Hardware considers making as a sustained form of thinking. The participating artists attend closely to material properties and to the accumulated knowledge embedded in processes of cutting, carving, joining, layering, weaving, painting, drawing, shaping, and assembling. Their works make visible the decisions that produce them: the adjustments, repetitions, hesitations, and embellishments through which form gradually comes into being.

Soft Hardware proposes a productive tension between material and method. The title suggests pliability and tactility, forms of knowledge that come from muscle memory, while also evoking the structures that allow things to function: the armatures, joins, supports, frameworks, and systems that hold an object together. It points toward an understanding of objecthood as both constructed and lived: things whose very existence depends upon accumulated gestures, techniques, and acts of maintenance.

The exhibition…