| Schedule of EventsFall 2002 |
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Opening Reception: Friday, September 13th, 5 - 8pm
Organized by Gallery 312 Programming Committee members Tom Denlinger and Jennifer Yorke
Reproduction, replication and regeneration are the themes of "Repo(session)." The artists in this exhibition appropriate, respond to and use a variety of cultural practices. These include measurement and quantification; mass production; representations of biological and climatic events; and media production.
We delight in being fooled by the lovely tromp l'oeil prints of Teresa Cole, the singular multiples of Myungah Hyon, and the art historical fakes of Clarke Bedford. Our sometimes destructive drive toward self improvement is examined by Jennifer Schmidt and Trevor Wentworth. Jan Estep both critiques the imperialism of arctic exploration and celebrates its optimism. Matt Bergstrom's Build Your Own Chicago postcards embody memories of a real or imagined visit to the city. The microscopic is endearingly familial in Alice Hargrave's photographs, life-threatening in the prints of AIDS activist Eric Avery. Incompatible forms collide and hybridize in the work of Stephanie Brooks, Aaron Wilson and Michael Barnes.
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Eric Avery, M.D. (Galveston, TX) Dr. Eric Avery's work fuses medicine and art. As the Director of HIV psychiatric services at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, Avery is a physician who works with late-stage AIDS patients. As an artist, he works to prevent the disease by changing the culture which fosters its transmission. |
| Lifecycle of HIV Showing Sites of Action of Medications, 1997, linoleum block print |
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Michael Barnes (Sycamore, IL) Michael Barnes' grotesque, hybrid creatures inhabit ambiguous dream-like spaces. Some are equipped with outlandish prosthetic devices, others are about to emerge from shrouds or chrysalises. Richness of surface and tone is in tension with the pathetic, repulsive beings depicted. |
| The Wait, 2001, lithograph and collograph |
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Stephanie Brooks (Chicago) Stephanie Brooks appropriates and conflates a variety of ordinary objects and systems. Love Songs, a 2001 collaboration with composer Joshua C. Bowes, is a series of five texts set to music, including an except of Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle and an on-line personality test. The printed sheet music of Love Songs literally renders the appropriated texts lyrical. Brooks warns, however, that the music may be jarring. |
| Love Songs, 2001, offset printed booklet |
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A. Clarke Bedford
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DC) Clarke Bedford makes familiar and well loved historical art absurd in work that is at once irreverent and nostalgic. He takes aim at the pieties of nineteenth century photography in works that employ both the subject matter and techniques of the era. A series of faux-Victorian memento mori photographs, including The Dead Canary and Death of a Prep School Boy have the soft, sepia glow of the real thing. Bedford's series of high-art Pez dispensers merge the pill-like candy of youth with the culturally salutary eye candy of museums. |
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Matt Bergstrom (Chicago) The "Build Your Own Chicago" postcards made by Matt Bergstrom contain all the parts necessary to construct detailed and accurate models of thirteen city landmarks. Each postcard includes complex model components and diagrams that are both beautiful and daunting. The difficulty of constructing these exquisite models parallels the struggle to remember the past clearly. |
| Build Your Own Chicago (Elevated Train), 2001, offset printed postcard |
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Teresa Cole (New Orleans, LA) Printmaker Teresa Cole exploits the formal and technical possibilities of her medium to manipulate the perception of space. Clouds and Swags, an installation of relief print made in 1999, puts two tromp l'oeil images into conflict. A repeated image of a reflective swag of satin creates the illusion of a soft length of fabric hanging from the wall. Just above it float a series of fluffy clouds in a deep, expansive sky. Teresa Cole's rich images both cheat expectations and reward careful examination with lush texture and an elegant visual cadence. |
| Clouds and Swags, 1999, relief prints |
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Jan Estep (Minneapolis) Jan Estep continues to focus on the "discovery" of the South Pole. Estep posits the notion of Antarctica as a place that is sought after but never really defined. Her Antarctica exists as much in the public imagination as in the real world, and represents both the evils of colonialism and its boundless optimism. |
| Still from Search Routes, 1699-1916, 2001, video |
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Alice Hargrave (Chicago) Alice Hargrave has been using medical and other imaging technologies since 1993 to expand vision, exploring the minutiae of a broad range of subjects from micro-organisms to micro-satellite markers of our genetic code. She is fascinated by and apprehensive of the capability of new technologies to actually see into the body, recording in images something as invisible as metabolic activity, a heartbeat, or emotions. |
| Family Portrait/micro-satellite markers/Chromosome #22, one of a series of three reactions, 2000-2001, ink jet print |
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Myungah Hyon (Chicago) Myungah Hyon creates seemingly solid objects composed of ephemeral and incomplete parts. A stack of paper all printed with the same image is cut at an angle. Each sheet contains only a part of the image, but the entire image may be seen on the cut edge of the stack. Hyon offers visitors a sheet from a stack of images--but the image of an open hand is projected onto the white circles of paper. The gift offered is imaginative rather than tangible. |
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Jennifer Schmidt (Boston) Jennifer Schmidt demands action. "Coupon Pattern" and "Save" suggest self-improvement through a paradoxical combination of thrift and consumption. Lots of Fortune of 2001 asks viewers to take a fortune from a wall covered in identical tear-off tabs. Each is told that "Your eyes will be opened to a world full of beauty, charm, and adventure," suggesting both the wish fulfilment of the self-help industry and the ostensive benefits of art itself. |
| Lots of Fortune, 2001, installation of fortunes |
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Trevor Wentworth (Ridgeland,MS) From the rather unsavory and certainly unsanitary world of microorganisms Trevor Wentworth creates visually compelling paintings, prints and sculpture. Wentworth examines the ill effects of personal neurosis and excessive ambition through the story of a microorganism called "Small," who has an overwhelming drive to grow. Eventually Small becomes so large that it is isolated and unsustainable. |
| Entropy in the System, 2001, ink on paper |
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Aaron Wilson (Cedar Falls, IA) The shifting relationships between nature, culture and technology are explored by Aaron Wilson. Bear 2, a mixed media sculpture, depicts the head and torso of an extension cord wrapped bear emerging from a large vertical light box. The extension cord that defines the bear cascades from its nose to an electrical outlet. Bear 2 suggests that the idea of "nature" is an artifice, a cyborg energized by the power grid that is somehow given shape and life by technology. |
| Bear 2, mixed media |
