I invite you to stay here long enough to notice.
Notice what? Well, whatever calls to you. That burst of color that brings you closer. An expression of fierceness or sadness caught out of the corner of your eye. Maybe it was a moment of silence, and you wondered: how does one photograph silence? To pay attention is to make room for curiosity.
To look again. To stay with a person, a place, an idea, or a question long enough for something unexpected to emerge.
Storytelling may be one of the oldest ways human beings make experience knowable to one another. We tell stories to remember, to understand, to question, and to give form to things that can be difficult to name. Artists do this through images and sound, through observation and encounter, through research, experimentation, and of course through making.
Since 2013, graduate students in Duke's MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts program have practiced these acts of sustained attention. They have turned their attention toward history, science, communities, landscapes, institutions and experiences of love, memory, grief, and belonging. The projects do not share a single subject or way of working. What connects them is a willingness to stay with a question and to look closely, test possibilities, follow what emerges, and find a form by which they can share their findings.
Toward Knowing gathers a selection of these works. Together, they suggest that knowing is not always a matter of arriving at an answer. Sometimes it begins by paying attention.
