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Id, Shannon Egan

Schmucker Art Catalogs

The five sculptors in ID challenge the conventions of representational self-portraiture. In their selective and often abstract use of figuration, these artists engage the identification of self as it is situated socially and institutionally—one’s “I.D.”—as well as the psychoanalytic dimensions of the “id.”

The exhibition’s title introduces a kind of paradoxical conflict between public identification, found in various bureaucratic forms of I.D. (passports, drivers’ licenses, and Social Security numbers, for example), and the id, a Freudian classification for the most basic and unconscious physical drives (sex, food, aggression).

All of these artists respond to the seeming incongruities of I.D. and …