"Go To Pieces: Recent Graduates From the School of the Art Institute of Chicago" Exhibition
Monya Rowe Gallery
This event has ended.
Monya Rowe Gallery is pleased to present Go To Pieces: Recent Graduates From the School of the Art Institute of Chicago curated by Philip Vanderhyden featuring Greg Bae, Paula Crowne, Ron Ewert, Chiara Galimberti, Tony Lewis, Josh Reames, Mario Romano, Will Sieruta, Winslow Smith and Clare Torina.
Greg Bae: My painting installations push pictorial viewing into actual space. The work tangles with illusion, is fueled by physicality and balanced by photography. Aside from documenting the installation, converting it into a fixed flat image re-presents the work, blurring the relationship between space and image. Copies of the photos are often used as raw material to make collages and parts of a past installation are assembled into sculptures. Sometimes the photos, collages, and sculptures are put into a new installation. This collapses genres of abstraction and representation, real and fake, ephemerality and permanence.
Paula Crowne: My work is about discovery and memory. It is unified through a vocabulary that reinforces the metaphor for space and the sublime. My process of coming to understand and how to create meaning is inherent in the each piece’s content and form.
Ron Ewert: I use painting as a framework for an investigation of potential and the forms by which a moment prior to use, exchange or transformation can be isolated, rendered final and judged aesthetically.
Chiara Galimberti: My work tends to be context and place specific rather than self-referential. I am particularly interested in analyzing human behavior and the social dynamics of oppression as they play out in everyday life, and in investigating art’s place within that space. Though lately I have been working in public space, the medium and modality of my practice is not fixed, but takes the needed form to fulfill a particular investigation or project.
Tony Lewis: I work primarily with graphite in various forms to make drawings. I enjoy playing with my self-appointed role as a respectful and subtle transgressor of convention, but also working within a structure, and assimilating to the limitations and expectations of its’ language.
Josh Reames: Lately, I’ve been thinking of painting as a framing device for a filtering and flattening of references: painting, artifice, abstraction, Vegas, the gesture, tropical vacations, bad taste, being serious, sunsets, escapism, “the ideal”, bifocal lenses, tanning salons, palm trees, tromp l'oeil marks, masking tape, etc. Within this frame I remove hierarchy between the references and stress the relativity of the parts and pieces. Instead of an absolute statement about something, the works are propositions or provisional truths.
William Sieruta: My work is concerned with the slippages that occur when divergent visual languages are forced together. Illusion and surface, painting and sculpture, tactility and opticality- these are examples of structural dichotomies I employ in a manner so they are never able to be reconciled, nor are they allowed to remain polarized and separate. My paintings explore the interplay of these opposites visually, analytically, and not without humor.
Winslow Smith: I make videos and I work with photographs. In images of the body and images that point back to the body, I explore anxiety – a sense of panic from feeling displaced or out-of-body – and desire – sometimes a sexual desire, sometimes a desire to escape or undo your self. My work attempts to describe a certain resistance or a type of inertia. It shares in a history of the absurd, where slapstick humor can talk about the limits we face as material and biological things.
Clare Torina: My work explores representation by questioning my own hand, education, and relationship to visual history. I approach painting through its cultural and fictive histories by both employing and exposing illusion.
Mario Romano: By now, I am sure everyone is sick of hearing about failure. So I am just going to come out and say that my work isn't about the paintings I do, mostly because they all fall short in the end. They are not weighted to each decision but rather a culmination of a hundred decisions. Sometimes I wish it were simpler…but for me it is not.
[Image: Winslow Smith "Delta Pictures" (2011) five laser jet prints: 36 by 24 in. each]
Media
Schedule
from November 16, 2012 to December 20, 2012
Opening Reception on 2012-11-16 from 18:00 to 20:00