This summer, the Sullivan Galleries presents Summer Studio. Transforming the gallery into artists' working space, a place of public presentation into one of process, Summer Studio is a rare chance for artists to share in the company-and energy-of others, while sharing the resources of this institution. Artists-in-residence come from Chicago and beyond to use the galleries to explore diverse and ambitious projects that engage discussions and practices that are particular to the studio. Launching new collaborations for SAIC, Summer Studio is also organized with threewalls, a Chicago institution dedicated to increasing the city's cultural capital by cultivating contemporary art practice ...
SAIC's Graduate Exhibition features work by the next generation of artists and designers. More than 120 students completing master's degrees exhibit their work in art and technology studies; ceramics; fiber and material studies; painting and drawing; performance; photography; printmedia; sculpture; sound; and visual communication design.
Both in form and in function, Ryan Trecartin’s video practice advances understandings of post-millennial technology, narrative, and identity, while also propelling these matters as expressive mediums. His work depicts worlds where consumer culture and interactive systems are amplified to absurd or nihilistic proportions and characters circuitously strive to find agency and meaning in their lives. The combination of assaultive, nearly impenetrable avant-garde logics and equally outlandish virtuoso uses of color, form, drama, and montage produces a sublime, stream-of-consciousness effect that feels bewilderingly true to life. This evening, as part of a special two-part presentation organized by the Visiting Artists ...
Ryan Trecartin's video practice both in form and in function advances understandings of post-millennial technology, narrative and identity, and also propels these matters as expressive mediums. His work depicts worlds where consumer culture and interactive systems are amplified to absurd or nihilistic proportions and characters circuitously strive to find agency and meaning in their lives. The combination of assaultive, nearly impenetrable avant-garde logics and equally outlandish, virtuoso uses of color, form, drama, and montage produces a sublime, stream-of-consciousness effect that feels bewilderingly true to life.
The films of British artist Emily Wardill are brilliant cinematic labyrinths. Visually striking and playfully rigorous, they draw upon an array of sources– underground theater, psychoanalytic case studies, the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche and Jacques Rancière, and even the game logic of Nintendo Wii–to pose fundamental questions about vision, representation, and media and their role in how we come to know ourselves. Wardill has been the recipient of much recent critical acclaim: Tate Modern film curator Stuart Comer rated her film The Diamond (Descartes’ Daughter) (2008) as one of his top ten picks of 2008 and The Guardian newspaper deemed ...
Matt Keegan works mainly with photography, collage, printmaking, and sculpture. Recently, he has been thinking about the myriad possibilities of archives, social history projects, cities, and ways to map and record time.
The documentaries of Pavel Medvedev are haunting portraits of some of post-Soviet Russia’s most isolated people and places. This rare screening presents four different facets of Medvedev’s remarkable oeuvre. Vacation in November (2002) follows Russian miners in the tundra. On a forced furlough from their regular jobs, they embark on an annual massive reindeer slaughter to supplement their income. On the Third Planet from the Sun (2006) studies life in the country’s resource-rich Arkhangelsk region, where inhabitants forage for scrap metal left behind from H-bomb testing. Wedding of Silence (2003) depicts a deaf community in St. Petersburg, juxtaposing an expressive ...
In 2006, experimental filmmaker Naomi Uman retraced her great grandparents’ emigration from Eastern Europe in reverse, settling in the tiny village of Legedzine, Ukraine, where she still lives today. The result of her adventures is the quietly picaresque quintet of 16mm films, The Ukrainian Time Machine. In capturing the joys and hardships of her neighbors’ centuries-old way of life– traditions that are eroding with the encroaching pressures of modernity–Uman creates a new kind of living history, fresh with curiosity and verve. In this evening’s program, Uman will present Unnamed Film, her keen documentary about life in Legedzine, cataloging its inhabitants’ ...
Artist talk by Abelardo Morell.
Colombia-based artist Doris Salcedo explores the significance of everyday objects and their power to implicate history. Her sculptures and installations infuse domestic materials with gestures of political and psychological archeology, and their sense of absence hovers in the space between the empowered and voiceless.
Amy Franceschini is a pollinator who creates formats for exchange and production that question and challenge the social, cultural, and environmental systems that surround her. An overarching theme in her work is a perceived conflict between humans and nature. Her projects reveal the ways that local politics are affected by globalization. In 1995 Franceschini founded Futurefarmers, an international collective of artists; in 2004 she co-founded Free Soil, a collective of artists, activists, researchers, and gardeners who work together to propose alternatives to the social and political organization of space.
The Blindness Series is Los Angeles-based artist Tran, T. Kim-Trang’s expansive, fourteen-years-in-the-making tour de force on vision and its metaphors. Comprised of eight videos, the series draws upon notions of blindness to explore broader political and cultural themes of identity, sexuality, society, and technology. This evening, to celebrate the Video Data Bank’s release of The Blindness Series in a new DVD box-set, Tran will present five works from the cycle, including a provocative documentary on hysterical blindness and the Cambodian civil war (ekleipsis, 1998); an essay on cosmetic eyelid surgery (operculum, 1993); and a meditation on the phenomenon of word ...
For the last six years, artist Takeshi Murata and musician Robert Beatty (Hair Police, Three Legged Race) have collaborated on a series of visceral glitch-based animations, setting Murata’s psychedelic imagery to Beatty’s hypnotic compositions. Murata's videos range from hand-drawn animations of fluidly morphing shapes to painterly abstractions of meticulously hijacked digital code. Beatty employs hacked electronics and thrift store cast-offs to craft otherworldly sonic narratives. Together, the duo’s electronic alchemy transforms the detritus of consumer culture into dazzling tapestries of sound and color. This evening, CATE teams up with experimental music and intermedia series Lampo to bring ...
New York-based photographer and writer Moyra Davey is known for her finely observed photographs of domestic interiors. Her graceful, straightforward images catalog life’s in-between moments and overlooked objects–still lifes of crowded bookshelves, empty whiskey bottles, and dust. In recent years, Davey has turned to video, combining her eye for the everyday with a literary voice. This evening, she will present two of these works. In Fifty Minutes (2006), Davey uses the standard length of a therapy session to examine her own history with psychoanalysis while also raising questions about autobiography, nostalgia, and the ways we all come to know and ...
Widely known for his innovative fine art installations, Doug Aitken is at the frontier of 21st-century communication. Utilizing a wide array of media and artistic approaches, Aitken's eye leads us into a world where time, space, and memory are fluid concepts. Aitken's work effortlessly slips into our media-saturated cultural unconscious allowing the viewer to experience cinema in a unique way by deconstructing a connection between sound, moving images, and the rhythms of our surroundings.
Hailed as "one of the most interesting artists to emerge in this century" by Roberta Smith of the New York Times, Los Angeles-based artist and SAIC alumnus Sterling Ruby is known for his aggressive biomorphic sculptures, defaced minimalist forms, and large spray-painted canvases. His videos are similarly charged, referencing pornography, abstract painting, and evoking states of transience, entropy, and transgression. In Hole (2002), workers in the back room of a chain store surreptitiously and suggestively stuff merchandise into a hole in a plaster wall. Transient Trilogy (2005-09) finds Ruby playing both a drifter, who fashions talismans from the detritus ...
Thirty years before the ubiquitous YouTube mash-up, artist Dara Birnbaum hijacked television imagery in a series of coolly ironic videos that recontextualized pop cultural icons (Wonder Woman, Kojak, Laverne & Shirley), TV grammar (inserts, two-shots, wipes), and genres (soap operas, sitcoms, game shows) to reveal their ideological subtexts. Birnbaum described her videos as late 20th century "ready-mades"–works that "manipulate a medium which is itself highly manipulative." Now renowned as a pioneer in televisual appropriation, she is currently the subject of a major retrospective that began at S.M.A.K. in Ghent, Belgium, and will tour to Museu Fundação Serralves in Porto, ...
Over the last eight years, local musician and filmmaker Thomas Comerford has been at work on a series of quietly-observed films that contemplate the entwined social, political, and environmental histories of Chicago (Figures in the Landscape, 2002; Land Marked/Marquette, 2005). This evening, Comerford will present the world premiere of The Indian Boundary Line (2010). The film follows, as Comerford notes, "a road very close to my home in Chicago, Rogers Avenue," that traces the 1816 Treaty of St. Louis boundary between the United States and "Indian Territory." In doing so, it examines the collision between "the vernacular landscape, with ...
SAIC alumna Saya Woolfalk (MFA 2004) will present her ongoing project No Place, a multimedia, fictional future that reworks tropes of sexual, racial, and gender difference. The characters and stories in Woolfalk’s constructed reality evoke travel narratives, science fiction, and the rhetoric of anthropology to investigate human possibilities (and impossibilities). Through diverse forms of installation, video, painting, drawing, performance, and sound, she reflects on human life and its future through configurations of biology, sociality, and the environment.
This exhibition explores the richly complex politically- and psychologicaly-charged notion of the artist's studio today. With works by over 30 artists spanning the past two decades, this exhibition also includes several specially designed installations undertaken by artists on site. Curated by Michelle Grabner, SAIC, and Annika Marie, Columbia College, Picturing the Studio is presented in conjunction with the College Art Association's 98th Annual Conference in Chicago, February 11-13, 2010 and is supported in part with funds from the College Art Association and the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency. A poster-catalogue with art by Adelheid Mers ...
A two-day symposium focusing on temporary public artworks that address an "accidental public" – people, viewers, an audience, or passersby who are not expecting to encounter a work of art. The purpose is to theorize and compare the strategies of projects that attempt to bridge the art and everyday life divide in present tense and real space, and to engage discussion that explores our intentions and the effects of choosing to work in this way.
Accidental Publics is organized by Northwestern University's Department of Art Theory and Practice and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's Sculpture Department, ...