1. The American Dream: The (W)holy Grail presented by 6018North

Work by Christine Tarkowski, Jason Reblando, LaMont Hamilton, Kirsten Leenaars, Lise Haller Baggesen Ross, Vincent Tiley, Erol Scott Harris II, Macon Reed, Chicago Studio, and more.

6018North’s event with be located at 1050 W.  Wilson. Reception Friday, 6-10pm.

2. Nw Wrks at Firecat Projects

Work by George Blaha.

Firecat Projects is located at 2124 N. Damen Ave. Reception Friday, 7-9pm.

3. Bone & Blood: Structural Bodies in Motion at Squid3 Gallery

Curated by Phillip Schalekamp.

Squid3 Gallery is located at 1907 N. Mendell, #4-H. Reception Saturday, 6-10pm.

4. PROCESS OF SUBTRACTION at Chicago Art Department

Work by Allison Grant, Nathan Miller, Jessica Pierotti, Victor Salgado, Chuck Przybyl, Daniel Hojnacki, nicole white, and Edyta Stepien.

Chicago Art Department is located at 1932 S. Halsted St. Reception Friday, 6-10pm.

5. Much Much More presents Karen Reimer at Chicago Public Library

Work by Karen Reimer

Chicago Public Library, Humboldt Park Branch is located at 1605 N. Troy St. Reception Saturday, 3-4pm.

The Hagedorn Foundation Gallery, located surprisingly in a nondescript complex of galleries and antique shops in Buckhead, a north-side neighborhood of Atlanta, curated a show focusing on feminism, performativity, and photography. The works in the show by the artists Jill Frank, Mónika Sziládi, and duo Double Zero (Hannah Ireland and Annie Vought) examine how to make a photograph of someone, a person, a woman (perhaps) and what that means. One of the organizing principles of the show – performativity, a buzz word indeed especially since the 1990s with Judith Butler’s work on gender – finds itself in relation to photographs that draw attention to the process of their making. Alongside considerations of gender and femininity as performative gestures, the works in the show investigate the apparatus of photography and imagistic representation itself – Jill Frank’s work in particular. Adding to this work by Frank is the Untitled (Projection) series by Steffani Jemison presented in her solo exhibition, When I Turn My Head, in the upstairs gallery at Hagedorn.

The works in Ready for My Close-Up evoke other images of women from history: paintings, film stills. These other images, not necessarily direct references, exist in an assemblage of representation with Frank’s, Sziládi’s, and Double Zero’s. When seen in conjunction with When I Turn My Head, the sphere of the imagistic medium, photography, opens itself to critical examination and self-reflection. Ready for My Close-Up seems to ask whether the question of female or feminine representation is the question of representation itself.

Jill Frank’s Menacing Romance

Four photographs from Jill Frank’s series Romance are presented in the show: Romance / Popocatépetl and Iztacchíhuatl (2012), Romance / Secret Sniper (2012), Romance / Vertigo (2013), and Romance / Un Homme et un Femme (2013). All images are chromogenic prints with rich colors that provoke fantasies, and with their large size (30” x 37”), the viewer feels as if she can initially step into the scene. The first two images, Romance / Popocatépetl and Iztacchíhuatl (2012) and Romance / Secret Sniper (2012), depict more unsuspecting narratives, whereas the last two images, Romance / Vertigo (2013) and Romance / Un Homme et un Femme (2013) start to take on a more sinister e/affect.

A woman lays across a kneeling man’s knee with her head invisible to the viewer – it hangs down, exposing her throat where his his hand rests. Her knee hosts a series of bandages, the slingback of her shoe has slipped from her heel.

Two men stand at the edge of a dock. Wearing matching colored shorts, one holds the other from behind, grasping at his neck and chest. The man standing in front reaches over his head to hold onto the man behind him. The man in front looks up obliquely with an indistinguishable gaze.

These two photographs: Romance / Vertigo (2013) and Romance / Un Homme et un Femme (2013) exemplify the complications Frank creates for our traditional senses of Hollywood romance. Frank’s statement for the show describes her process and intentions behind the series:

“The photographs in this exhibition portray couples re-performing poses inspired by popular media images that were formative in constructing their own understanding of romantic interaction and presentation. The photographed performances challenge the authority and familiarity of the collective visual archive of American romance in order to engender a critical conversation about the influence of dominant representations.” [1]

The show’s title Ready for My Close-Up directly references the last lines aging Hollywood actress Norma Desmond speaks in the 1950 film Sunset Boulevard. The film, a story of a silent film actress gone mad yearning to occupy the space of the Hollywood picture again, ends with her face approaching the camera until it disintegrates into a haze of grey. Her closeness to the camera quite literally destroys her, but it was the years of distance which contributed to her delusions. [2] Hagedorn’s exhibition statement describes the cultural reference to the film in relation to the photographic works shown in Ready for My Close-Up:

“In the last half century, feminism and performativity have influenced contemporary photography more than any other cultural markers. The exhibition title is taken from the exit line of Sunset Boulevard, a film which questions female identity issues, the rehearsal of the self, the gaze of the viewer, and the use of the theatrical to command attention, all influenced by culture and all features of this group exhibition.” [3]

The works in the group show can all serve as critical responses to the film, whether the work is explicitly influenced by the film or not; they exist together in the sphere of representation’s history. Frank’s photographs play out the deranged romantic entanglement of the film’s Desmond and Joe Gillis. Mónika Sziládi’s photographs present the viewer with a crowded and disorienting perspective of cultures and practices of representation. Double Zero’s photographs and video portray a feminine masquerade pushed to hyperbolic extremes.

 

 

Sziládi, The Montage-Paparazzi

Sziládi’s photograph Untitled (Ladies) (2012) sticks a fuzzy and blurred face into the foreground of the image. The close-up shot has gotten too close like Norma Desmond’s final close-up in Sunset Boulevard. The six photographs shown at Hagedorn are from her series Wide Receivers, possibly a play on the position in American football, the players that are able to receive passes from the quarterback and are often celebrated for those glorious catches. Her statement describes her interests in the “social sphere and its attendant behaviors” and her “aim to collapse the space between the physical and the virtual.” [4] The images, a flattening of perspectival depth, contain images of imaging or representational processes and those who are allowed representation. There is a sense that when one figure stands in front of another, there is no space between their bodies; one actually cuts through the other’s body.

Untitled (Blonde) (2011) can be read as representing representation itself. Through Sziládi’s inclusion of images of handheld cameras, subjects posing for snapshots, a woman putting on make-up reflected in a mirror, and a perhaps drag queen taking up the center space of the photograph, after whom the photograph is titled, the photograph seems to become a commentary on the practice of photography itself. Next to the blonde, a man was caught with his eyes closed. To the left of him, a man’s eye peers directly out of the frame towards the subject looking at the photograph. Michel Foucault states that the 17th century painting Las Meninas (1656) by Diego Velásquez

“presents us with the entire cycle of representation: the gaze, the palette and brush, the canvas innocent of signs (these are the material tools of representation), the paintings, the reflections, the real man (the completed representation, but as it were freed from its illusory or truthful contents, which are juxtaposed to it); then the representation  dissolves again: we can see only the frames, and the light that is flooding the pictures from outside, but that they, in return, must reconstitute in their own kind, as though it were coming from elsewhere, passing through their dark wooden frames.” [5]

 

 

Sziládi’s digital composites of images taken at “public relations and networking events as well as trade shows and meet-ups of social segments that have connected online to interact offline” [6] comment on the constructed nature of the way we present ourselves in public and the ways in which we image those constructions. Like Velasquez’s painting, the apparatus of representation shows itself explicitly, drawing our attention to our own practices of presentation and public performance.

 

Double Zero’s Revealing Masks

Double Zero’s photographs and video push these meticulous constructions of public appearance to the extreme. In their video Cha cha cha changes (2013), Hannah Ireland and Annie Vought dress each other up with unconventional objects or conventional objects in unconventional ways. Over the course of the video’s almost 23 minutes, the two women take on absurd costuming and masking. With materials that are used for make-up application and other cosmetic tools, their faces become covered in lipstick and face paint, their heads bound in bubblewrap and what appears to be foil that could be used to dye hair. Flower stems are stuck into the fabrics wrapping their heads, blooms sticking out from their faces.

 

 

The two take turns transforming each other’s appearance. In what appears to be a reference to Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle, particularly Cremaster 3, they go through processes of bodily manipulation and adornment. [7] If Barney’s Cremaster Cycle is about the development of the male testes, what can be said about Double Zero’s feminine transformations? Their statement reads: “We have united to use our 20 year friendship as the basis for investigating the ways we affect one another, the boundaries between us, and different modes of taking up space in the world. With the complexities of friendship and the trust we’ve built over time, we pursue these themes directly in the actions and objects we make together.” [8] Their photographs and video show a relational transformation. They affect one another whether they choose it or not. The silliness of the objects and the resulting ornate masks when coupled with their facial expressions in the video, the phenomenon of feminine friendship grows into a complex situation of acceptance and denial.

 

 

Norma Desmond, after she convinces herself that her script for her film about Salome, the ancient femme fatale, will be directed by Cecil B. DeMille, she starts a rigorous beauty routine. She claims that she needs to make herself ready to be in the pictures again and a sequence shows her being massaged, prodded, wrapped, lotioned. At one point, while wearing products on her face and with her hair wrapped, she enters Joe’s room, but tells him not to look back at her; when she is made-up in this way instead of the proper way, he is not to gaze upon her. Desmond’s excessively vain self-consciousness, is a private practice made public. At another moment in the film, after gazing at herself in the mirror, eyes wide with frenzy, she rips off the cosmetic strips on her face before walking into Joe’s room to discover he is leaving her. She chases him as he exits the house. To get his attention, she shoots him. She shoots him again. This is the moment of her breakdown. After this moment, all she can do is sit in front of the mirror and prep for the camera.

 

 

Concluding Remarks: does Jemison’s ink adhere?

Desmond lives in a world of cameras and characters. To her, cinema ended when dialogue began. She says to Joe “We didn’t need dialogue, we had faces.” She then steps into the light of the film projector in her home movie theater that is showing one of the movies she had starred in. The woman actress need only have a face; she didn’t need a voice – this is the kind of cinema that Desmond supports. The voice destroys the perfect face; the face of 1932 Marlene Dietrich’s Shanghai Lily that Laura Mulvey gazes upon in her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” [9] As Joe Gillis voice-over narrates, Norma is a “celluloid self.” [10] Is the celluloid flat? Does it have any depth? Is her self only surface, the merging of the surface with the underlying anatomy, her body? Or, is her self a thin veneer covering the surface of the filmic foundation?

The upstairs gallery of Hagedorn hosts Steffani Jemison’s show When I Turn My Head which “considers issues that arise when conceptual practices are inflected by black history and vernacular culture” and also “addresses the form and materiality of a photograph through the fugitivity of the image.” [11] Works from her series Untitled (Projections), photographs printed on acetate, explore the ways in which an image may separate from its support. The ink does not sink into the acetate; it rests on the surface, creating a depth of materiality. [12] Mary Ann Doane writes in her seminal essay “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator” that “The masquerade, in flaunting femininity, holds it at a distance. Womanliness is a mask which can be worn or removed. The masquerade’s resistance to patriarchal positioning would therefore lie in its denial of the production of femininity as closeness, as presence-to-itself, as precisely, imagistic.” [13] Taken together with the works in the show on the ground level, what do we discover about photography as a tool and method for thinking through and creating structures of representation? How much does the image adhere to what it represents and the foundation which holds that very representation itself?

 

 

Sziládi, the figure of montage-paparazzi, makes apparent the apparatus of representation while Frank’s photographs create scenes in which non-extraordinary people inhabit the characters of Hollywood in order to experience true romance. What Frank shows us, though, is that these typical narratives are not without their dangers. Norma murders the man she has come to love. Whether or not that love is true is a question we could ask. In considering Ready for My Close-Up, must this love be artificial? Double Zero’s work seen as a sort of parody of making-up for the camera, expresses the artificial nature of feminine identity construction. However, within the framework of feminine friendship, we can’t too quickly dismiss these gestures of dressing one another. The collage nature of Sziládi’s digital images is seamless. Before knowing that they were constructed, I stood in front of the photographs pondering what parties they came from: where do these people gather? Are they all in costume together, playing into some collective fantasy?

 

 

Frank’s series grew from an iconic image, at least in today’s age of Hollywood: the image of Baby / Jennifer Grey crawling towards Johnny / Patrick Swayze in Dirty Dancing. A recognizable image. What sets Frank’s later photographs apart is their subjects’ poses are initially unrecognizable. In some way, their illegibility may gesture towards an infiltration of our cultural imaginary that we now fail to recognize. The everyday performances of relationships and romance congeal in Frank’s photographs.  Ready for My Close-Up, a show curated around the issue of feminism and performativity, finds its complexity in Frank’s strangely unsettling images of menacing romance, Sziládi’s disorienting flatness, and Double Zero’s interplay of masking and revealing.

Desmond, an embodied image of the female hysteric, is deluded. Her wide eyes stare out at the film spectator. As the character Salome, a woman who has been historically represented as a seductress, she approaches the camera, staring directly out at us, outside the frame of the film. In this moment, is she re-living/playing her past traumas? Traumas that may have led to this moment? In the film’s final moments, when Desmond declares that she is ready for her close-up, what can we say is exterior? What is interior?  Who is she? And, gazing at her, making eye contact, who are we?

 

 

Ready for My Close-Up
September 12, 2013 – October 25, 2013
Artists’ Reception: October 4, 2013, 6:00 – 8:30 PM

Panel Discussion with the artists and Wendy Vogel, Associate Editor at Modern Painters: October 5, 2013, 12:00 – 2:00 PM

Hagedorn Foundation Gallery
425 Peachtree Hills Avenue, Number 25
Atlanta, GA 30305

 

Notes

[1] Jill Frank, Statement

[2] Sunset Boulevard. Directed by Billy Wilder. 1950.

[3] Hagedorn, Statement

[4] Mónika Sziládi, Wide Receivers statement, http://msziladi.com/index.php/image/statement/13

[5] Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1994), 11.

[6] Sziládi, Wide Receivers statement

[7] I am indebted to Justin Andrews for calling this to my attention.

[8] Annie Vought, “Double Zero Videos,” http://annievought.com/category/double-zero/

[9] Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen, vol. 16, no. 3 (1975): 6-18.

[10] Sunset Boulevard.

[11] Hagedorn Foundation Gallery, Press Release for Steffani Jemison’s When I Turn My Head.

[12] During the panel discussion featuring Steffani Jemison, when I asked Jemison if she could describe the title choice and process of making these images, she replied that she was examining the make-up of a photograph: its support and its image. Panel discussion with Steffani Jemison, Rizvana Bradley (Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University), and Rujeko Hockley (Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum) on 9.21.2013 at Hagedorn Foundation Gallery.

[13] Mary Ann Doane, “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator” in Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 25. Reprint of the essay’s 1982 publication in Screen: Screen, vol. 23, no. 3-4 (1982): 74-88.

As a young art student in the late 90’s, I attended a talk given by Ernesto Pujol at RISD, where he presented his then-current project: an installation of Nazi-era porcelain as a commentary on whiteness, purity, and the attendant relationship these meanings have to the atrocities of World War II. I was immediately struck and moved by his handling of materials and ideas; it was one of those projects that burned itself into my consciousness and stayed with me for a long time.

Fast forward to 2012, and once again I came into contact with Pujol through writing for A Blade of Grass Foundation, where we both had been contributing our thoughts and research. I reached out to let him know of my long-time admiration, and he reciprocated with an invitation to his home for afternoon tea. When we met, his charisma and generosity were just as disarming as that morning lecture at RISD so many years before.

Pujol is a site-specific public performance artist and social choreographer. He has a long record of intellectual and interdisciplinary art practices which have dealt with concepts of collective and individual and collective identity, the sacred, social and political issues, and public/private space. Since the late 90’s, Pujol has also been working on public group performances, where the focus has rested with action, movement, the journey – and the central concept of the “artist-as-citizen.” Additionally, he is the founder of The Field School Project, where  young and emerging artists are individually mentored in site-specific practices.

This fall, in conjunction with the French Institute Alliance Française, Pujol is bringing his first public group performance to New York City. Time After Us is an ambitious, 24-hour collaborative perambulation of the interior of St. Paul’s Chapel in downtown Manhattan. By walking the space, animating it continuously from the morning of October 3rd through the morning of October 4th, Pujol and his twenty-three cohorts will produce a work about rest, second chances, and healing the past.

 

Catechumen (Baptism), Ernesto Pujol, 2009 (Photo by Ernesto Pujol)

 

You’re currently getting ready for a major performance, Time After Us, at St. Paul’s Chapel in downtown Manhattan, where you and a group of 23 collaborators will walk for 24 hours straight. Can you tell me a bit about how this project came together?

The curators of Crossing the Line 2013 contacted me last year, asking me to meet with them at the French Institute Alliance Française. They invited me to develop a new performance for the festival. This happened shortly after hurricane Sandy. They were moved by how New Yorkers united and responded to the catastrophe. They were also concerned about the future of the city, in terms of climate change. For the past two years, I had been quietly envisioning a performance that was constructed like a vortex, with performers walking a circle backwards and counterclockwise; combining vulnerability with the notion of the natural passage of time, time past and time to come, coexisting simultaneously in the now. I proposed it to them and they embraced my concept.

 

St. Paul’s is an historic episcopal church, but became an important contemporary touchstone when it provided a center for relief and recovery workers during the period surrounding 9/11. Does its connection to the nearby Ground Zero site have a relationship to Time After Us?

I first developed the concept for the performance without a site. Initially, I wanted a vast interior, enough to hold a mighty river of people whirling, and hundreds of people surrounding them, watching silently. We considered the Armory and Saint John the divine, among other spaces. Curator Gideon Lester suggested Saint Paul’s Chapel in Wall Street. Curator Simon Dove and I visited the site and fell in love with its interior and exterior. The third curator, Lili Chopra, approved it. The chapel feels like a little island within the larger island of Manhattan. It contains an amazing statement about mortality, with its green graveyard. There is no intended connection to 9/11, to Ground Zero. It is not a performance about loss and mourning, although a viewer may contribute that reading out of their own life story. For me, it is primarily a performance about rest and second chances; about revisiting the collective and individual past, and trying to heal it.

 

This will be your first public work in New York City. For someone who has made a conscious effort to satellite beyond the art world center, this feels like a very deliberate move. Why is it the right time to perform in NYC? 

I have had many solo exhibitions of images, objects and installations in galleries and museums in New York since the early 1990s. But this will be my first public performance, in terms of how I constructed my group performance practice since the late 1990s. Thus, this is not a “move,” in the career sense. It was an unexpected invitation, which I accepted with humility, as a matter of public service. I believe in Carol Becker’s notion of the artist as a citizen, a cultural worker. I simply seek to offer the city a place of psychic rest. I have lived and worked in this city for 28 years. I am 56 years-old. I have served as an educator in most of its art schools, as lecturer or adjunct instructor. There is no right time or wrong time. As a Zen Buddhist, I do not believe in human time. I am offering an ephemeral space-within-a-space for manifesting the intangible.

 

You’ve enacted many collaborative projects with diverse groups of people who are not necessarily artists.  How do you prepare someone – physically, intellectually, psychologically – who is not an active performance artist for an engagement like Time After Us?

As Rebecca Solnit said in her history of walking, one of my favorite texts, walking is one of the traits that made us human. Everyone walks. I believe that everyone yearns for moments of restful silence and creative solitude. They are a human right. I cannot imagine discerning one’s individual or collective future, in terms of deep decision-making, without them. And slowness. One needs to protect moments of slowness. I believe that these basic yearnings are found within and shared by all human beings. My performance trainings simply name them, identify them, and encourage them out of bodies. I work like a midwife, unleashing remarkable human potential.

 

Flux, Ernesto Pujol with Jeffrey Baykal-Rollins & the Silsila Collective, Istanbul Modern, Turkey, 2013 (Photo by SC)

This summer, you choreographed FLUX at the Istanbul Modern Art Museum, a “reflection about our collective future,” in collaboration with Jeffrey Baykal-Rollins and the Silsila Collective. This, of course, was taking place at the same time as the Gezi Park protests, during which the Istanbul public was also making a major push for their collective future. How do you feel this work resonated with this major cultural movement? What “publics” did it tap into?  

That was the second of two performances Jeffrey Baykal-Rollins asked me to collaborate on. We initially met in New York, where he did an internship with me one summer, at the end of which I strongly encouraged him to found a performance group in Istanbul. Turkey is undergoing great political changes. Its hybrid democratic tradition is under threat. The Turkish people are seeking many interventions and I was happy to support the use of metaphor in this cause. The silent group performance took place in the courtyard of Istanbul Modern. Many people came, professionals and students, young and old. They read through our encoded language and understood quite clearly that we were mourning the recent and ongoing violence, seeking to uphold the best of the Ottoman past, while also cathartically releasing anger and frustration, and finally finding a moment of rest before disappearing into their uncertain future. I experienced a humbling gratitude for being allowed to contribute my voice to the nation.

IT’S WITH MILD trepidation that I’m posting the essay I wrote for the upcoming John Preus show I curated for the Experimental Sound Studio (ESS) below. I say this chiefly because John’s own lyrical prose, posted here yesterday, is a very tough act to follow.

As I was writing this text, conversations I had had with John, glimpses of work in progress I had stole at our studio visit, and fragments of phrases from email exchanges were all still marinating for me. You’ll see some which percolated into the essay as quotations, but others are noiselessly wafting around and above it like a shimmering cloud of gnats.

This long-form approach to engaging with John’s work is what draws me to it– I have the sense that it is both tightly bound, fitted and finely finished, while simultaneously being on the verge of a blow out, ready to burst back into all the little bits and pieces he used to put it together in the first place.

Hopefully you had a chance to take in some of his other handiwork at EXPO this past weekend, and experience the atmosphere his work can initiate even amidst the hustle and bang of a massive art fair. I liken it to several tenants of the growing Slow Food movement below, but again John has bested me, and I have come to prefer his term “temporary stasis” for how it marries the fleeting with the stable.

In a way, I feel that dichotomy reflects the relationship between my text and John’s; mine being the former, his the later. I’ve used this introduction as a departure from my typical tone and mode of working in a nod to him, in gratitude for his art and writing which has inspired me, however cautiously, to adopt the gentle discomforts and bracing inscrutabilities of both lyrical prose, and long-lasting ideas built into short-lived experiments.

 

John Preus is an artist, musician, carpenter, woodworker, and magpie. In the

long-standing tradition of Chicago artists scavenging for “trash treasure,” he lets

serendipity and the thrill of the hunt guide him in sourcing discarded materials. Each

new piece is a design challenge, contingent on entropy and surplus, to revive what

others have cast-off or given up on. His materials offer up an infinite number of

solutions which he is constantly attempting to “extract and exploit.”

His built objects typically serve a functional purpose, and oftentimes they are made for

domestic spaces but comprised of cannibalized furniture. His work is Surreal in the

most basic sense that it de-familiarizes the familiar; we recognize a tabletop here or a

headboard there. Because of this, it occupies a liminal space between constituent

parts and compound whole.

At times, Preus foregrounds the beauty marks and scars of his material— a found,

hand-painted design becomes the focal point of a guitar, imbuing it with a certain

narrative quality. Other times, his material serves as a sort of visual pun— you’ve

heard of making bedposts metaphorically sing? Well, Preus does so literally, turning

one quarter of an old four-poster bed into an upright bass. By combining a fondness

for his material’s embedded histories, with a craft person’s skill at building, and an

artist’s eye for shine, his pieces celebrate their past proudly, reveling in their physicality.

Oftentimes, this infuses them with a certain anthropomorphism. And yet, they are

incomplete without us— who will play them? Who will listen to them played? The

wistful air of the stray and the mutt also cloaks them, a perfect tragic foil to the

aforementioned comedy.

Slow Sound draws inspiration from the Slow Food movement, sparked in part by

Fergus Henderson’s cult classic cookbook, “The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating.”

This call to eat not just the choice cuts “high” on the hog, but the whole hog, necessarily

means getting creative by saving bones for stocks, scraps for brines, and rendering

the rest. Henderson has famously stated; “If you’re going to kill the animal it seems

only polite to use the whole thing.” It’s that mentality which resonates so strongly with

Preus’s own practice, echoing his questioning of the contemporary consumerist

mantra, “Replacement is better then repair.”

Closing loopholes by pulling items out of the waste stream is done not so much with

an overtly environmental thrust, although upcycling and net-zero philosophies are

applicable. Likewise, the importance of the locally sourced and the handcrafted factor

in, but aren’t the main driver. When I imagine Preus spotting the corner of a legless

Formica table poking out of a dumpster in the alley, I bet he thinks about how the press

board hiding just underneath its laminate surface is comprised of the same wood that a

family heirloom is made from, and that in some factory somewhere, it was a person

who helped fabricate it. Preus understands that the materials he works with shape shift

as they move through the world, rising or falling in value due to changing tastes or

compromised functionality.

The importance of context then becomes paramount, and so viewing— and hearing,

these pieces at the Experimental Sound Studio is central. Preus’s instruments are one-of-

a-kind— no two pieces are alike, the materials used to fabricate them are

unique, and their overall construction is unconventional. Simultaneously, however, they

produce relatively standard sounds. New Material, the band comprised of Mikel Avery,

Leroy Bach and Tadd Cowen, along with Preus, play straight ahead improvisations,

replete with melodic solos and quoted popular tunes. And so again, these pieces

shape shift, cultivating relationships across incongruities; they are accessible and

engaging while simultaneously surprising expectations of traditional instrument

construction, sound resonance and amplification.

Preus’s practice conflates fine art, design, architecture, music, curating, writing, social

engagement and environmental studies, among other things— such as parenthood,

citizenship and faith. It transgresses commonly held notions of labor and value in favor

of a post-scarcity worldview. It questions industrialization’s monocultural market place

and the planned obsolescence it perpetuates. It celebrates leisure time and recreational

activities in a loose sense, honoring unstructured deep play and creativity-sparking

boredom. It recognizes change as inevitable and speed as constant, but puckishly

messes with the variability of pace. More than anything, it is concerned with morphology,

how a given material might be used or re-used. Preus has referred to his work as

existing in “temporary stasis,” which I must concede is a much more elegant term than

“slow.” Like the Doppler effect, which explains why the frequency of a sound in motion

shifts in respect to its observer, Preus’s work meets you where you are. It offers up its

past, points the way to a more sustainable future, and embroils you in the day-to-day

and the domestic through a practice heavily reliant on viewer involvement.

• • •

John Preus is a Chicago-based artist, musician and woodworker whose work explores

forms of attachment, craft, art, and community life. Preus holds an MFA from the

University of Chicago (2005), and his education in the trades includes a 2-year

apprenticeship with award-winning furniture maker John Nesset. With roughly 16 years

of building and design experience, Preus founded Dilettante Studios in 2010, which

creates and fabricates items for residential and commercial spaces, using predominantly

secondhand materials. He co-founded the art group Material Exchange

(2005-12) with Sara Black; and SHoP (Southside Hub of Production) with Laura

 Shaeffer (2010). He is former lead fabricator and project manager for Theaster Gates,

and oversaw production and installation of 12 Ballads for Huguenot House as part of

dOCUMENTA 13, Kassel, Germany. Additional exhibitions include the Museum of

Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Heilbronn Kunstverein; the Portland Museum of

Contemporary Craft; the Smart Museum of Art, Chicago; and the DeVos Museum of

Art, Marquette, Michigan. Preus’s work will be featured in a solo exhibition at the Hyde

Park Art Center in Spring 2014.

 

My thanks go to John and the friendly, hard-working staff of ESS.  Please join us at The Experimental Sound Studio, located at 5925 North Ravenswood Ave. Chicago, IL 60660, for the opening reception of John Preus: Slow Sound, 9/27/13, 6-9pm. Special performance by New Material (Mikel Avery, Tadd Cowen, LeRoy Bach, John Preus) at around 7pm.

Please join Amanda Browder for the unveiling of her new fabric installation sponsored by Fourth Arts Block (FABnyc) www.fabnyc.org

FAB FESTIVAL / OPENING
SATURDAY SEPT. 28th 1-5pm
LOCATION:  East 4th Street (btwn Bowery and 2nd Ave) - NYC
INSTALLED FRIDAY EVE til SUNDAY EVE

“Good Morning!” is a fabric installation that will be draped on the facade of the building located at 72 East 4th Street, NYC. All the fabric is donated by people from the neighborhood, as well the generous support from Materials for the Arts.

Big THANKS to all the volunteers, neighbors, and donors of time and material. After all the PUBLIC SEWING DAYS we have made this amazing project come together. YOU MADE IT HAPPEN…I couldn’t have done it without you.

http://goodmorningproject2013.tumblr.com/

The FAB! Festival is a celebration of arts and culture in the Lower East Side taking place on Saturday September 28, 2013 from 1-5pm with an annual attendance of over 3000 people. The event hosts multiple stages both indoors and outdoors, as well as food vendors, visual artists, activities and community partners on East 4th St. between Bowery and 2nd Ave.

http://www.fabnyc.org/

This will be an exciting project to brighten up the street, bring attention to the neighborhood architecture, and bring together community members. It is important to take time to notice things and share them with others, especially in New York which is so full of creative individuals and energy.

“Good Morning” is being created for the FAB! Festival as part of FABnyc’s SUSTAIN project, with generous support from the Rockefeller Foundation Cultural Innovation Fund: www.fabnyc.org/sustainability.php

www.amandabrowder.com