Exhibitions

Apophasis: Communing with the Unsayable

October 29 – November 23, 2026

Korn Gallery
Dorothy Young Center for the Arts
Drew University
Madison, NJ 07940

Opening Reception Thursday, October 29, 4:00 – 6:30 pm

• Artist/organizer walkthrough
• 4:00 – 4:30
• Draw Your Own Path drawing workshop with John F. Simon, Jr.
• 5:45 – 6:30

Open Tues-Fri, 12:30 – 4:00 and by appointment.

What won’t go into the record? A timely question in the wake of rapid technological expansion, which has deemed that what can be named, sorted, and counted often comes to stand for what counts and what is real. When society codifies what counts as knowable, it also settles who gets to make a claim at all.

After something important, a farewell, a conversation, a moment we’ll remember, we try to capture it. A few lines, a photo, a date. All accurate, and yet something is missing. Ask what it was really like, and the words begin to run out. Not because language fails us, but because language fails the thing itself. The same gap opens everywhere: in a report, a study, a letter, a caption, a eulogy.

This exhibition lives in that gap. At its heart is apophasis: a knowing by unknowing, a way of approaching what cannot be said through negation, silence, withholding and indirection. It says not this, not that, not the thing you just reached for. Think of someone who orders coffee without milk and is told there’s no milk, so would coffee without cream be all right? The two absences are not the same. We feel the difference, even if it’s hard to explain. What is missing is what we receive.

Late 2025, we invited artists, writers, researchers and professionals to work with the ineffable as something practiced. Fifty-five people from around the world answered. This first viewing offers a glimpse of work still unfolding, ahead of forthcoming publications and exhibitions. It also opens the conversation to others from neighboring spaces, including Vision Lab's Dream Incubating, as well as students and faculty at Drew.