October 3 – November 7, 2013 Curated by Sara Black and Karsten Lund For this experimental group exhibition, thirteen artists or collaborators explore manifestations of "imperfect symmetry"—a phenomenon emerging at the hazy border of two more familiar concepts, symmetry and asymmetry. Through photographs, videos, sculptures, sound works and performances, these artists offer varied interpretations of this odd but evocative notion, which is potentially full of metaphorical or interpersonal meaning. A collective investigation featuring multiple points of view, this group exhibition is working through an idea rather than starting with something fully formed. Imperfect symmetry might be understood as a moment of tension as symmetry falls apart or fails to coalesce; or as a permanent state, observable in the natural world; or as a metaphor for human desires or habits as we try to understand one another or make contact with other people, among many other possibilities. Together the artists' wide-ranging artworks and live performances amount to a compendium of sorts: an inventory of examples or an anthology that gradually builds toward a more complete view of its topic. The exhibition is also accompanied by a publication featuring additional material by all the participants, presented as a series of autonomous entries. In its printed form, the publication is both an extension and an oblique reflection of the exhibition in the gallery space. A related program of performances will take place off-site on October 25, 8:00pm at Defibrillator Performance Art Gallery, 1136 N. Milwaukee Avenue Additional information at www.dfbrl8r.org
Transcript
October 3 – November 7, 2013Curated by Sara Black and Karsten Lund
For this experimental group exhibition, thirteen artists or collaborators explore manifestations of "imperfect symmetry"—a phenomenon emerging at the hazy border of two more familiar concepts, symmetry and asymmetry. Through photographs, videos, sculptures, sound works and performances, these artists offer varied interpretations of this odd but evocative notion, which is potentially full of metaphorical or interpersonal meaning.
A collective investigation featuring multiple points of view, this group exhibition is working through an idea rather than starting with something fully formed. Imperfect symmetry might be understood as a moment of tension as symmetry falls apart or fails to coalesce; or as a permanent state, observable in the natural world; or as a metaphor for human desires or habits as we try to understand one another or make contact with other people, among many other possibilities.
Together the artists' wide-ranging artworks and live performances amount to a compendium of sorts: an inventory of examples or an anthology that gradually builds toward a more complete view of its topic. The exhibition is also accompanied by a publication featuring additional material by all the participants, presented as a series of autonomous entries. In its printed form, the publication is both an extension and an oblique reflection of the exhibition in the gallery space.
A related program of performances will take place off-site on October 25, 8:00pmat Defibrillator Performance Art Gallery, 1136 N. Milwaukee AvenueAdditional information at www.dfbrl8r.org
Moonskin 5, 2013 Silicone and simulated lunar regolith
The way we look at a thing produces and alters a physical, psychological, and empirical knowledge of the said thing. To view a thing like the Moon on almost any given clear night is an experience that most have had since their childhood, but when that child or subsequent adult is given the experience of viewing the moon through a telescope and seeing all the textures and craters, the reality of the moon begins to unfold itself. The reaction is almost universal wonder, the lust to touch it, scientific curiosity, and the mythologizing of how we interpret that moment. The Moon is eggshaped, not a perfect sphere, due to the gravitational pull of the earth while the moon was in a molten state. We are interested in the poetry of how a thing forms from the force of another pulling it towards its center.
We are creating mediated memory by changing the way we look at the cosmos; through an iPhone or camera lens, performative reenactments from visual memory, telescopes, etc. Earth Rise is a time lapse series of sunlight recorded on cyanotype paper with a biconvex lens. Using a simple and replicable process derived from early scientific methods by Eratosthenes, the Earth’s rotation around the Sun is captured over 6 hours.
While looking through a telescope, we sculpt a surface from only the creation of that surface. The Moon Skins are a visualization, a map, a pressing of the differences two humans have produced from a singular moment. Moon Skin 5 exists in three sections; the two outer sections having been carved by each of us independently and the middle has been carved collectively. The lack of symmetry is formed through the response to and interpretation of data. Allowing it to become a document that reflects both the biometric signature of the individual and the way in which one explores the topography of a remembered landscape. — SB & JB
Sarah Belknap and Joseph Belknap are Chicago based artists and educators who receive their MFAs in Performance Art from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They have been collaborating with each other since 2008. Their exhibitions include: Our Findings From Spaceship Earth, Roxaboxen, Chicago; 2 of a Kind, LVL3, Chicago; Exchange, CAVE, Detroit; Line of Site, Western Exhibitions, Chicago; IT'S GETTING HOT IN HERE, Chicago Artists' Coalition; Romantic Notions, Los Caminos, St. Louis, Missouri; Video Night, Airplane, Brooklyn.
Rivals, 2013Drywall, drum set hardware, video loop
Recently, I have been struggling to achieve what could be referred to as a form of “symmetry” between my work as an artist and as a musician. These two practices have always been compartmentalized, existing as two separate aspects of my creative endeavors. By forcing the two to coexist in the form of installation and performance I have been able to exemplify the imperfect nature inherent in both practices. — SC
Exhibition proposal: two facing drum sets with a shared kick drum
Scott Carter received his MFA in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011, where he was the first recipient of the Eldon Danhausen Fellowship for Sculpture. He previously spent six years as an artist and student in Atlanta, Georgia, where he received his BFA in Painting from the Atlanta College of Art / Savannah College of Art and Design. Scott recently attended residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and the Ox Bow School of Art. Since 2011 he has had solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Center of Las Vegas and Linda Warren Projects, Chicago, and took part in a group awards show at Beers Lambert Contemporary in London, where he was the first place winner of the emerging artist award in sculpture. Scott will also be having a solo exhibition with Beers Lambert in 2014.
Performance on October 3, 2013 at Averill and Bernard Leviton A+D Gallerywith performers Sabrina Baranda, Gemma Martin, and Evelyn Sanchez
ESCAPE GROUP is a collaborative endeavor by Anthony Romero, Jillian Soto, and any number of past, present, and future participants. Collaborations in sculpture and performance have been shown nationally most notably at threewalls in Chicago and the Nada Art Fair in Miami. Collaborative writings have appeared online and are forthcoming in print.
For most of our lives, we were told that we were fraternal twins. That is, up until a few years ago when we discovered that this might not be the case. Our parents admitted that they had never actually had our DNA tested at birth and therefore didn’t know for certain whether we were fraternal or identical twins. Our parents said that they could obviously tell us apart at birth so they knew that we were fraternal (and they didn't want to pay for an expensive test for the doctors to tell them what they already knew). This was the first time we discovered that we might not actually be fraternal after all.
So this year we decided to do a twin DNA test. A Zygosity Test to be more precise. A twin zygosity test compares the twins’ DNA profiles to see whether they match—an exact match proves that the twins are identical. We went to a lab to collect our DNA samples and the document shown here presents the results of our zygosity test. We found the DNA interpretation summary confusing at first, but quickly realized that the data showed that we have in fact been identical twins (not fraternal) all along. — AF & MF
Michael and Alan Fleming currently live and work in New York. The Fleming twins have been working collaboratively since 2005. Their work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including shows in Chicago, New York, Berlin, Copenhagen, Glasgow and Rio De Janeiro. They are currently fellows in the AIM (Artist in the Marketplace) Program at the Bronx Museum of the Arts and International Artists in Residence at the NARS (New York Art Residency & Studios) Foundation. As a result of their participation in the AIM Program their artwork will be exhibited at the Bronx Museum in the Summer of 2013 for Bronx Calling: The Second AIM Biennial. In 2008 their video series "At Rest: The Body in Architecture" won the "Performing" section at the Kinolewchyk Festival at the Idea Museum in Lviv, Ukraine.
The Distance of a Day, 2013Two-channel digital video (color, sound)12 minutesCourtesy of the artist and Chert, Berlin
In early February I asked my mom to go and watch the sunset and make a video. She did this from the Palos Verdes Peninsula, where I used to watch the sunset when I lived in California. She made the video with her iPhone taped to a metal barrier that protects people from falling over the cliffs.
In synchronicity with her, I too was looking at the sun and making a video. From my perspective the sun was rising. I had calculated where the sun would be seen as rising at the exact same moment it was seen as setting in Los Angeles. In early February this was the Maldives, a location which may not exist in the near future due to the rising of the seas.
As my mom watched the sun set into the Pacific Ocean, I was watching it rise over the Laccadive Sea. Synoptic is useful term here. It comes from the Greek syn, meaning “together”, and optic, meaning “seen”. Though separated by thousands of miles, we were watching the sun together.
The title, The Distance of a Day, is a reference to the idea of the journey. Originally, journey meant the distance one traveled in a day. Here, the spatial distance that separated my mother and myself was not defined by the distance one could travel in a day, but by the day itself. By the delimitations of a day—where the sun rises and where the sun sets.
Phones were chosen to make (and display) the video because they are devices that orient us spatially and temporally. They are like contemporary pocket-watches and compasses that we carry with us. They coordinate and synchronize us. They broadcast moments instantaneously across distances. Or, what seems to be instantaneously. There is always some delay...
Right now somewhere the sun is simultaneously setting and rising. Someone or something is probably bearing witness to this. — DH
David Horvitz was born in Los Angeles, California and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Pas De Deux, 2013Two-channel video20 minutesSpecial thanks to Yoni Goldstein
Being With (diptych, left), 2013Chromogenic contact print
Just after dawn, very near the solstice, we took a walk together. Circling around a small quarry several times, and eventually walking along the shore of Lake Michigan, we constructed this video from our respective individual vantage, each of us cradling a video camera. Two points of view, side by side, falling in and out of sync, each to their own rhythm and cadence. What can intimacy be?
A space is composed for a viewer to see out of two bodies at the same time, though doing so may be disorienting. To be close is to be caught up in the dizzying and intimate space between two bodies, to step back is to lose the intimacy, but to gain steady perspective again.— JH & HM
Holly Murkerson currently lives and works in Chicago, where she received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2010. Recent shows include Sea Change (Andrew Rafacz, Chicago), Mémoire Involontaire (Columbia University, New York), and the 21st Evanston and Vicinity Biennial (Evanston, IL) curated by Shannon Stratton. Her work was the subject of a solo exhibition, Landlocked Blue, in 2011 at Julius Caesar, Chicago. In addition to her visual practice, Murkerson contributes to ADDS DONNA, a gallery space in Chicago collaboratively programmed by seven artists.
Jessica Hyatt has an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art. She has worked at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, the Rose Art Museum in Waltham, MA, and currently works in education at the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been shown in Chicago, Boston, and London and distributed throughout the United States, and in Mexico, Costa Rica, Spain, Great Britain, Canada, Germany and Vietnam.
corpus, crevice, 2013Felted rope, graphite rubbings, study objects, sound
I took this exhibition and its framing as compendium as an invitation to think some things together, to weigh some things together. The double invitation to produce a physical work for a gallery and a written text for a printed publication opened up space for me to work through a set of impulses/ideas/intuitions in two distinct and parallel modes.
The writing came first, and with it a strong wish to finally say it, to finally find language for my deeply felt sense that formal thinking needs to find its voice when it comes to matters of social justice. This proved difficult. In Gravity and Grace, itself a compendium of sorts, Simone Weill insists that we must draw back before the object we are pursuing. “Only an indirect method is effective. We do nothing if we have not first drawn back.” Further, “The wrong way of seeking. The attention fixed on a problem. Another phenomenon due to horror of the void.” Not easy to trust my own trust of this when the thing I am after feels so urgent.
And what to do with the lack of language for what that thing is? In a corner of the gallery I have gathered, paired, divided, aligned, separated, hidden found objects of study, fragments of older projects, newly made work in hopes of tricking understanding into being. My own understanding as much as yours. Relations, and relations of relations. The dark logic of subterranean connections. — JL
Judith Leemann works as an artist, writer, and educator. She served as Assistant Editor of the anthology The Object of Labor: Art, Cloth, and Cultural Production (SAIC and MIT Press 2007) and has published work in The Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy; Frakcija performing art journal; Textile: A Journal of Cloth and Culture; and LTTR. With Shannon Stratton she co-curated Gestures of Resistance at the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, Oregon (2010) and co-authored a chapter in the book Collaboration Through Craft (Bloomsbury Press, 2013). Recent exhibitions include Resonating Bodies (The Soap Factory, Minneapolis, 2013) and Structures for Reading (Center for Book and Paper Arts, Columbia College, Chicago, 2013). Leemann is Assistant Professor in Fine Arts 3D/Fibers at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
Performance on October 25th; program begins at 8:00pm. Defibrillator Performance Art Space, 1136 N. Milwaukee Ave.More information at www.dfbrl8r.org
Lucky Dragons is an ongoing collaboration between Los Angeles-based artists Sarah Rara and Luke Fischbeck. Active as a band since 2000, they are known for their participatory approach to making music, radically inclusive live shows, and playful, humanistic use of digital tools. Fischbeck and Rara have presented collaborative work in a wide variety of contexts, including the Whitney Museum of American Art (as part of the 2008 Whitney Biennial), the Centre Georges Pompidou, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, London’s Institute for Contemporary Art, The Kitchen in New York, REDCAT and LACMA in Los Angeles, MOCA Los Angeles, the 54th Venice Biennale, and the Smithsonian’s Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, among others. The name “lucky dragons” is borrowed from a fishing vessel that was caught in the fallout from H-bomb tests in the mid-1950′s, an incident which sparked international outcry and gave birth to the worldwide anti-nuclear movement.
Light is Waiting, 2013Digital video11 minutes 20 seconds
Thinking about Light Is Waiting, the real asymmetry in question there is not so much in the visual doubling/mirroring, but in the equivocating of TV and Video Art, or a sort of evening out of the two via the cliches and tropes of each (the canned staging, dialogue, sentiments, and conformity of family sitcoms VS. every trick in the Video Art book... slow motion, flicker, mirroring, feedback, etc. ... which are all normative and canned in their own right). I wanted the piece to feel at war with itself and its demons, yet needing both sides of its split personality to exist (the abstract video needs the structure and pleasures of the sitcom to make sense of itself, and the sitcom needs the aggression and release of abstraction to escape its overdetermined, formulaic malaise. So the visual doubling/mirroring, the building flicker and sonic assault, are really meant to be read as the audio-visual manifestation of these two traditions at war, working out their differences and finding their common ground. — MR
Michael Robinson is a film and video artist whose work explores the joys and dangers of mediated experience, riding the fine lines between humor and terror, nostalgia and contempt, ecstasy and hysteria. His work has screened in both solo and group shows at a variety of festivals, museums, and galleries including The 2012 Whitney Biennial, The International Film Festival Rotterdam, The New York Film Festival, The Walker Art Center, MoMA P.S.1, The London Film Festival, REDCAT Los Angeles, The Wexner Center for the Arts, The Sundance Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, Tate Modern, Impakt, Media City, The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The Images Festival, The Ann Arbor Film Festival, and the San Francisco, Melbourne, Leeds, Vienna, Singapore and Hong Kong International Film Festivals. He was the recipient of a 2009 residency from The Headlands Center for the Arts, a 2011-2012 Film/Video Residency Award from The Wexner Center for the Arts, a 2012 Creative Capital grant, and his films have received awards from numerous festivals. Michael holds a BFA from Ithaca College, an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Cinema at Binghamton University.
Ostensibly a drawing exercise for willing participants, Selves Portrait departs from straightforward portraiture by the fact that two participants share a double pencil and each tries to draw the other. The likely result is a single portrait that looks like neither participant and bears heavily the traces of their negotiation. Two wills, one outcome; many possibilities that conflate production and consumption, self and other. — BR
Brian Rush makes videos, performances, relational objects, and interactions that use humor and discomfort to investigate inhibitions, fruitful vulnerability, invitation, and authenticity. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
Moon Drawing #10, 2013Unique gelatin silver print from one negative
Moon Rise / Moon Set (August–September 2013) (in–progress), 2013HD video on loop
Courtesy of the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago
Moon Drawing #10 and Moon Rise / Moon Set (August–September 2013) are imprecise representations of one moon cycle, photographed and filmed over the course of one month from the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina. Using film and video cameras side-by-side each night, sometimes for many hours, I took multiple exposures of the moon in its various phases – allowing the video camera to record the moon coming into and out of the frame, in real time, and rewinding my medium–format film by hand after each round of exposures.
The photograph is a unique gelatin silver print made from a single negative photographed over one month; the video is a digital composite of footage recorded of each moon over the same month. In the video, at times the moon appears to bounce in the frame – the result of sudden gusts of wind.
Although I tracked the moon with help from the Farmer's Almanac and astronomical charts from the U.S. Naval Observatory, the exactness of my process was less important to me than thinking of the moon as raw material, belonging to everyone – a paradoxically dynamic formal and physical constant. — CS
Carrie Schneider makes performative photographs and short films. Recent exhibitions include Gallery 44 in Toronto; Fotogalleriet Oslo; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; Istanbul’s santralistanbul; Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh. Awards include: a Jerome Foundation NYC Film & Video Grant, Illinois Arts Council project grant, AVEK production grant (Finland), a Joan Mitchell Foundation Residency Fellowship, and a Fulbright award to study film at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki. Carrie lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Performance on October 25th; program begins at 8:00pm. Defibrillator Performance Art Space, 1136 N. Milwaukee Ave.More information at www.dfbrl8r.org
Symmetry appears as an opaque conceptual trampoline in Younger. The harder we bounce on it, the further away we repel towards hazy, exuberantly poor symmetries. Some of our performances are undertaken without preparation and are investigations into a theory of pure difference. We often attempt to super-bounce (double jump) one another. A super-bounce only occurs when both bodies inhabit a contradiction: being perfectly out of unison. We become a cosmic flam that reveals and reflects entire worlds of potentialities and otherness through our increasingly close encounters. Suddenly, one of us is rocketed away, diffused in every direction, by this blessed super-bounce, only moments after our bodies landed wholly, harmoniously, out of sync. It’s a gift we only know after the fact of the etheric launch. And when the launched returns, wide-eyed, dazed, a little bruised, but thankful for the gift of having gone through and beyond symmetry, the launcher asks, “Who are you?” Launched and launcher arrive somewhere more symmetric by way of witnessing the other as infinitely diffuse. – MJ & RH
Younger is Matt Joynt (Anathallo) and Ryan Daniel Hammer (Unwed Sailor, The Skull). The two began collaborating in 2007 after discovering a mutual interest in attempting forms of risk-taking that produce unhindered presence. Early performances with High Places and Lucky Dragons were about the naked terror and ecstasy of showing up without any songs. Whatever happened was an attempt to sonically mirror their internal experiences coming together. Over the past few years their sets have produced caverns of ricocheting sine waves and improvised mantra-like lyrical meditations. Other times they have been beat-heavy, dissonant, far out, and even embarrassing. Their LP, New Message—two long-form improvisations, written, recorded and mixed in the summer of 2011—falls somewhere between the worlds of psychedelic drone and pop and is available on Positive Beat Recordings.
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