The New Normal brings together thirteen artworks that explore the increasing exposure of the private sphere to public view, whether voluntary or involuntary. Each of the works shown was completed after October 2001, when Vice President Cheney described new government surveillance measures after 9/11 as “the new normalcy.” At the same time, as telephones were tapped and airline passengers were searched, many of us willingly began to document and share aspects of our own lives online, for convenience or community.

Personal information has become a readily available raw material. In response to this shift, many of the artists featured in The New Normal have used other people’s private information and images—home videos, financial data, leaked documents—as the basis of their work. By doing so, they offer disconcerting glimpses into the lives of neighbors, strangers, and celebrities, while making visible the social and aesthetic conventions that lie behind these disclosures.

Other artists in the exhibition adopt self-disclosure as a strategy, one that seemingly conflicts with the need for privacy. These artists willingly reveal their own bodies, their consumer habits, and their domestic spaces. For some of them, this reflects the social desire to build intimacy; for others, it is framed as a gesture of defiance in response to the intrusiveness of surveillance.

Taken as a whole, the works in The New Normal suggest that access to private information is a currency whose circulation is growing and evolving. We may find this exchange both frightening and fascinating, but we are inescapably complicit in its perpetuation.