In his book A Lover's Discourse, Roland Barthes attempted to theorize the language used by lovers to describe each other. It is arguably a text about loneliness, suggesting that even romantic language confesses the distance that always exists between people--if we could achieve perfect unity with others, language would not be necessary. This book is about how "couples" discourse--about the ways in which artists cope with the social connections and practicalities of being artists in a couple. It is about the commonalities as well as the differences, the intimacies as well as the...

The power of art has always been found in those uncanny spaces between formal abstraction and the narratives of representation. Inseparable parts of a more complex whole, they are the collaborative symbiotic conditions that have created the most compelling works of art since antiquity. Uncanny Congruencies investigates these elliptical collisions of association and meaning and offers a nuanced dialogue with its audiences through the seemingly contradictory processes of eighteen remarkable alumni of Penn State's School of Visual Arts. The works of these artists intersect, reverse,...