Expression is what the artist is after from the beginning, whether this expression be the exorcism of emotion, the creation of order out of chaos, or the science and the exercise of the artistic process itself. What constitutes the aesthetic is only one issue among many in the discourse of art, in recent years the discussion of art has come to directly address issues of context, both immediate and historical, and to address the question of the artist's role in society. The communicative value in a work of art, i.e. its importance to the public, depends upon many factors, the foremost of these being the degree to which its presence, whether physical or immaterial, whether witnessed or imagined, re-defines art and clarifies a view of the world at large. Mania is the pejorative term used when an artist's personal expression is more intense than the dominant discourse of the art world. The expression of personal concerns is itself a heroic task, and it only becomes problematic when the expression itself is oversimplified to stress overt truths and omit hidden ones.
Mania is characterized by the overflow of kinetic energy.
Like ether in a carburetor, it fuels the artist who overrides pragmatic concerns, in particular gallery or corporate art and its implicit and explicit rules governing production and careerism, in the quixotic artistic quest. Art has been long been kenneled by its practitioners' hyperawareness of market changeups, of art as promotion, and of art as trivia and tedia. People have also been kenneled into a state of near-complete submission to external and transient voices, commercials selling, finally, a divisible, replaceable, factotum quality of life. The artists in this exhibition, however, have rejected these homogenizing impulses, and these artists have produced works of immutable intellectual, aesthetic, and social resonance. As James Harithas states, The artists in this exhibition span the distance, whatever it may be, between obsession to courage.