Political theorists have encouraged us to think of states of exception as states of the suspension of law, the handiwork of the tyrant, or the tyrannical. In her multifarious aesthetic inquiries, Susan Ossman manifests the acuity of her vision of the tyrannical. She does not, however, rest with the fashionable presumption that all is political. She acquaints us and confronts us with many other states of exception. On the dark side, she treats the existential condition of migrants without homes or succor, the hallucinatory devastation of the deceived lover, the nomadic wandering and wondering of the diseased, suffering, ever-mindful mindful body, threatened with death. On the bright side, she has unveiled in media extending far beyond the pictorial the ecstasy of passions exceptional even as they partake of the everyday: the visceral ecstasy of erotic and auratic passion, the breathtaking glow of a poppy, the scent and texture of the many places she calls home.

Accomplished artist, ethnographer and scholar, Ossman looks outward, toward others, but also within, toward herself. She etches the double perspective in everything that she inscribes, a painterly and ever-so-flexibly sculptural endeavor that works into its sensuous terrain the words of philosophers, her own writings and the wisps and whispers of vernacular conversations drifting in thin or thick air. What Ossman actualizes is a project informed at once by an anthropological view from afar and an intimacy that could have come from no one else but the artist herself. The result is not yet another celebration of the integrity of the individual, but instead a recognition of the self’s dispersal, its hit and miss fleetingness, and its ever renewed potential.