The Lodge Gallery is proud to usher in the new year with Alterity, a group exhibition featuring works by Reuben Negron, Emily Burns, Curt Hoppe, Rebecca Goyette, Frank Webster and Ulrike Theusner.

As individuals we choose to keep our personal obsessions with physical pleasure close to the vest, under the table and sometimes in the closet. As a society we are a lot bolder. We build our public fantasies on magazines, advertising campaigns and big budget films but inside we all long for a deeper connection to our true selves. Anyone who has dressed up for a masquerade or is accustomed to a uniform  knows the transforming effect that donning a costume can have. Useful as a largely positive mechanism for coping with social anxiety, we all dress up in our own self constructed costumes that mask our true selves in order to navigate the daily complications of our public lives. For some, the only way to explore more personal subjects such as desire, power, control and role reversal is to embrace an ulterior identity associated with a literal mask or costume to be donned as a shield of safety from judgement and public scrutiny. Sometimes these masks are literal and other times they are as subtle as an attitude or context. Each of us, in our own subjective way, learns to stitch together the necessary disguises we require in order to reconcile our pursuits of the baser instincts of human nature and to act out on our natural desires or secret fantasies.

“People seldom change. Only their masks do. It is only our perception of them and the perception they have of themselves that actually change.”

― Shannon L. Alder