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You may be the first artist to send a yawn around the world. I hope this is taken as a complement, as it was intended.

Eriko Arakawa
Super Model, Socialite, Art Expert and Old Skool Party Girl

The more I learn about semi-essentialism the more it seems obvious that much of the work in this show is either consciously or accidentally related to that movement. The key work on this is James Macpherson's "Somethings and the Things in between" from 1976. Macpherson taught aesthetics at Virginia University until his tragic death in 1984.
His basic idea was that a new movement in art had developed at around the end of the Sixties/early Seventies that was specifically interested in the way that art objects didn't really have to be objects at all, or were just barely objects, but without being aggressively anti-objective or renouncing thinghood altogether. As he once famously put it, "Between things and nothing there's a lot of interesting stuff." Macpherson relates this movement to all kinds of contemporary art practices as well as, theoretically, to problems of definition and essence that go back to Aristotle.
Anyway, a yawn seems a nice example of the shady grey areas between things and not-things. A yawn happens, it exists, it's something. At the same time it is something difficult to isolate and is often unnoticed except insofar as it passes itself along to another person-- yawn after yawn after yawn.

P.S. There's a funny fragment from Alexander von Humbolt's travel writings during his trip to the American continents in 1799 where he mentions the onomatopoeiatic nature of the English word yawn. I.e., saying the word yawn is almost like actually yawning and if you say the word yawn a few times in succession it kind of makes you want to yawn.