Mist Over Lake Miami
OPENING RECEPTIONS:
Thursday, March 2
6:00 – 9:00 p.m. ThreeWalls: Andrea Cohen
Friday, March 3
4:00 – 6:00 p.m. The Chicago Cultural Center: Ryan Swanson
7:00 – 10:00 p.m. 40000: Michael Andrews
7:00 – 10:00 p.m. Fraction Workspace: Loul Samater
Saturday, March 4
6:00 – 9:00 p.m. The Suburban: Clinton King
ON VIEW: MARCH 2 – APRIL 8, 2006
Sculpture has worked its way to the edges of the room and back again. After a few decades of dispersal at the hands of installation art, and its deconstruction by the evolution of traditionally two-dimensional practices to include performative gestures, sculpture has been coaxed back to centrality and some precarious unity. It is as if all of the sundry elements of an installation have retreated from the walls, ganged-up in the center of the room and piled themselves in arrangements that suggest a freestanding sculpture, yet notably, these sculptures don’t stand. Instead, they are mobile, they are amendable and they are responsive to the space; and despite not being a solidified object, there is still some kind of chemistry and wit between the materials (pipe cleaners, cardboard, yarn, balloons, sticks, Styrofoam) – a certain je ne sais quoi – that makes them decidedly unified.
Showing consecutively in 5 spaces throughout the Chicago community, The Happiness I Seekwill feature artists Andrea Cohen (at ThreeWalls), Loul Samater (at Fraction Workspace), Ryan Swanson (at The Chicago Cultural Center), Mike Andrews (at 40000) and Clinton King (at The Suburban). Through a format of dispersing the sculptural installations throughout the city, the exhibition takes on the rhizomatic and cooperative nature of current art and exhibition practice: the materials of the artworks and the artworks of the exhibit and the spaces in a community imply the ideas of attraction, chemistry and the dancing cheek-to-cheek as evoked by the title’s Irving Berlin’s lyric. The whole-made-up-of-the-parts is underscored by the rippling effect of the exhibition and its strategy of domino openings. Visitors can complete the exhibition publication by collecting the cover at ThreeWalls and pages from each venue.
The Happiness I Seek was curated, in conjunction with ThreeWalls, by Shannon Stratton, director of programming at ThreeWalls and Jeff M. Ward, current Core fellow for critical writing at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Links:
The Happiness I Seek exhibition booklet (pdf)
Cohen represented by Walter Maciel Gallery
The Chicago Cultural Center's Website
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