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EXPO Chicago, 2016.

Location: Festival Hall, Navy Pier, Chicago.

When: 22-25 September, 2016.

This is the Fifth International Exposition of Modern and Contemporary Art.

This post documents 2016 Expo Chicago Programs:
IN/SITU, EXPO Projects.. and.. IN/SITU Outside.

IN/SITU Program: provides a dynamic opportunity for exhibiting galleries to showcase large, site-specific installations by leading international artists. It is curated by Diana Nawi, Associate Curator at Perez Art Museum, Miami.

EXPO Projects: is presented alongside IN/SITU in and around Navy Pier, featuring a curated selection of works organized by EXPO Chicago. The site-specific installation program highlights large scale and performative works by emerging and established artists represented by 2016 Exhibitors.

IN/SITU Outside: provides an opportunity for EXPO Chicago to present temporary art installations along the lakefront and throughout Chicago neighborhoods. It is presented in partnership with Chicago park District [CPD] and City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events [DCASE].

OVERRIDE / A BillBoard Project: This is the inaugural billboard project “OVERRIDE”. The program features the work of 15 artists from mafor local, national and international galleries on Chicago’s City Digital network consisting of 28 digital billboards from August 29 to September 25, 2016.

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IN/SITU Program

The IN/SITU program provides exhibiting galleries the opportunity to showcase large-scale installations and site-specific works by leading artists during EXPO CHICAGO.  As a core program, installed within the vast architecture and vaulted ceilings of Navy Pier’s iconic Festival Hall, the strength of the IN/SITU program is its ability to feature major suspended installations in addition to large scale work. Diana Nawi, Associate Curator at Pérez Art Museum Miami since 2012, was curater of the 2016 program.

Curatorial Statement

A Break in the Code makes visible the underlying structures that order and shape the world around us. Bringing together works from a diverse range of practices—including performance, sculpture, and architecture—this program examines and intervenes into the codes and forms used to demarcate our everyday life, by appropriating or interrupting common gestures and modes of communication, capitalizing on and redeploying systems of power and exchange, and imbuing quotidian experiences with the poetic. The featured artists subvert these systems through performance, appropriation, and unexpected intimations of materials. Illuminating the strangeness of some of our most fundamental structures and objects—whether political, visual, technological, economic, or social—they reveal the constructed and mutable nature of the actual ‘programs’ that shape our lives.

The works included as part of the IN/SITU program address subjects that range from architecture, industry, and the constructed environment, to the election funding system—from illicit and underground economies, to the site of the fair itself. While some artists render the familiar strange, others question language and media, as well as the dynamics of consumer and mass culture. Collectively, the selected works insinuate themselves into the codes that define our lives—suggesting and enacting the possibility that we can reconsider, rethink, and reinvent the world we inhabit in ways both subtle and radical.

 

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DISCLAIMER
Although all the images in the post have been taken by me,
the text is taken from the EXPO Chicago website.
IN/SITU.. click here..
EXPO Projects.. click here..

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Sky Over Coney Island – by Spencer Finch
Courtesy of Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago.

Spencer Finch’s work uses varied material forms to reflect the particularities of environmental conditions—to capture among other things, the exact color, shade, or luminosity of a fleeting moment tied to place, history, and personal memory. This work creates a color palette using balloons of different hues to match the sky, inserting as many as four balloons of different shades inside one another, and inflating them to different diameters. Finch drove a carload of these blue balloons to Coney Island, and chose the one that most closely matched the color of the sky over the Cyclone, the amusement park’s famous wooden roller coaster, at this exact moment in time. Finch selected an ultramarine violet balloon inside a cobalt blue balloon inflated to 11 inches. Each time he exhibits the work, the balloons, which can be gathered in scales ranging from small bouquets to massive clouds, are arranged to these exact specifications—poetically capturing and reiterating an elusive perception through humble, everyday materials.

 

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Egg, 2016 – by Victoria Fu
Courtesy of Honor Fraser, Los Angeles .

Created through a layering of analog and virtual processes, Egg is a mix of 16mm film, digital projection and shadow play. Like a “digital photogram” of sorts, Egg references Man Ray’s early “rayographs.” As a testament to its flexibility as an image file that can be manipulated or adapted to various sites and circumstances, Egg has previously taken on different physical forms such as a two-story museum façade, as well as a stage-lit backdrop to a video installation. In this manifestation for IN/SITU, Egg is a large banner suspended from the ceiling–the image as sign, as brand.

 

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Recursive Demarcation [2016] – by Amalie Jakobsen
Courtesy of Efrain Lopez Gallery.

Recursive Demarcation is a performative installation that examines vision, power structures in public space and means of occupation. the two mediums – sculpture and performance – often different approaches to these ideas.

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The Dream That Woke Up [2016] – by Shana Lutker
Courtesy of Susanne Vielmetter Gallery, Los Angeles projects, Los Angeles.

Shana Lutker’s mirrored light boxes and hanging piece offer variations on the sentence, “THE DREAM THAT WOKE UP.” Derived from a 1930 poem by Surrealist poet Robert Desnos, Lutker has been working with the line for several years. In French, the title of the poem is, “J’ai tant rêvé de toi,” which translates as, “I’ve Dreamed of You So Much.” But what changes in translation, what is lost? The task of translating poetry is arduous, arguably even impossible, exposing the limits of language, text, and cultural exchange. Much of Lutker’s practice interrogates the subconscious, psychoanalysis, Surrealism, and questions of translation. In her work, dreams are examined as always already failed attempts at rational translations of our unconscious, fragments of narrative caught and held by our waking minds. In the works on view here, Lutker plays with the phrase THE DREAM THAT WOKE UP, writing it in different ways and in different materials in a “font” she made from simple geometric shapes, blurring letters and symbols. These works offer subtle, uncanny moments—repeated encounters with a poignant text that has been fractured and in some instances, rendered illegible—allowing the viewer to move between sentiment and the nonsensical, language and object, experience and mystery.

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Slumpie 9 – Knee Hole, 2016 .. and.. Slumpie 10-Lawn Chair, 2016 – by Jillian Mayer.
Courtesy of David Castillo Gallery, Miami.

Jillian Mayer’s Slumpies are a body of sculptures presented as utilitarian objects.
Slumpies acknowledge our ever-increasing relationship with our various devices, relieving us of the need to support our own bodies. They are Mayer’s solution to this endemic problem of our contemporary moment—the type of issue that can arise only in the context of a technologically driven, luxury saturated consumer-oriented marketplace. The clumsily rendered Slumpies, with their bulky shape and strange palette, suggest a lack of conscientious design—an ad-hoc solution made from simple materials that stands in direct contradiction to the sleek forms and designs, and the marketing culture, that defines our intimate dependence on technologies.

 

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Carpet Painting (Bedroom and TV Room), 2012 – by Rodney McMillian
Courtesy of MACCARONE, New York, Los Angeles.

Rodney McMillian’s multi-disciplinary practice examines issues around the politics of subjectivity and cultural histories. McMillian employs various mediums to dismantle notions of a fixed subjectivity to challenge the narratives that we have woven for ourselves. Carpet Painting (Bedroom and TV Room), originally included in his exhibition, Prospect Ave., at MACCARONE, New York in 2012, is one of a number of wall-based works McMillian has made using this domestic material, pulled from his own living space. The exhibition’s title was derived from the artist’s previous residence and illuminates his interest in the way in which the home represents a site where subjectivities are constructed, lived, and performed. McMillian employs strategies of appropriation and material transposition to bring the intimacies of the domestic into the realm of the exhibition space, suggesting the way in which private material culture points to questions of class inequities is implicit within the tradition of modernist architecture.

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Works from the Narco Headlines series, 2015 – by Julio César Morales
Courtesy of Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco.

Julio César Morales’s work seeks to illuminate the strange and the poetic in the political, particularly surrounding issues of displacement, migration, and informal economies. His approach involves extensive research; Morales collects images and anecdotes from media sources related to the often illicit trafficking of goods and people. For Narco Headlines, which was originally presented as a suite of handmade text-based drawings, Morales drew on his archive of internet news headlines relating to drug smuggling methods that were intercepted and thwarted by the authorities. These de-contextualized snippets of language function simultaneously as irreverent, absurdist poem-like testimonials to failed smuggling attempts, while also revealing the desperation-fueled ingenuity of underground economies.

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Rotunda [2016] – by Bettina Pousttchi
Courtesy of Buchmann Galerie, Berlin, Lugano.

Bettina Pousttchi best known for her large-scale public photographic interventions covering entire building facades. For her suspended piece at EXPO CHICAGO, the artist has used her own photographs of patterned, blackened oak beams of historic half-timbered houses in Germany as a starting point. The historic elements are isolated and arranged in ornamental patterns, thus displacing the original reference and transposing the fixed gravity of architecture into dynamically reconfigured decorative elements which float above viewers. The work combines the language of these historic houses in European architecture with that of ornamental patterns of the Middle East. This interlacing of architectural histories and material culture reflects the artist’s central interest in creating a transnational visual language. 

 

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Nomadic Habitat (Hustleman), 2015
Courtesy of moniquemeloche, Chicago; Pearl Lam, Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai; Salon 94, New York.

This customized vending cart and collaboration with Chicago street vendor Garland Gantt was initially created for the Chicago Architectural Biennial in collaboration with The Arts Incubator, Art + Public Life initiative at the University of Chicago. The artist brings the urban street into the white cube by inserting a readymade commercial enterprise into an audience-centered environment. An important source for the structure of the cart is The Habitat Marocain built in Casablanca in the mid-1950s in response to the urban expansion of Casablanca, then under French control. Swiss architects, André Studer and Jean Hentsch, believed that their specially designed housing plans were tailor made for the indigenous population, taking into account their particular requirements. The symbiosis between Nomadic Habitat and The Habitat Marocain highlights the artwork’s utilitarian and architectural approach, illuminating the same contradictions between cultural assumptions and the lived realities of passing inhabitants. Through this, the work exposes the complex relations between ethnographic imagination, and the synthesis with design. Realized with funding by: Art + Public Life initiative at the University of Chicago with additional support from Theaster Gates, Eric McKissack, Amy and John Phelan.

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For Freedoms
As part of the inclusion of For Freedoms in the IN/SITU program,
the organization has been invited to curate a selection of works.

Founded by artists Hank Willis Thomas and Eric Gottesman, For Freedoms encourages new forms of critical discourse surrounding the upcoming 2016 presidential election. The medium for this project is American democracy, and the mission is to support the effort to reshape it into a more transparent and representative form. Rather than representing at a symbolic level, this project appropriates and redeploys what has now become a guiding force in politics in the United States, the super PAC—a “political action committee” that can raise unlimited amounts of money from corporations, unions, and individuals in indirect, and often untraceable, support for politicians, parties, and causes. Inspired by American artist Norman Rockwell’s paintings of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms—freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear–from 1941, this super PAC aims to subvert a “Rockwellian” nostalgia for a “simpler” America while co-opting a visual language that is accessible to a wide audience of viewers. As reported in the New York Times, this organization is raising “funds for national advertising, much of it based on original artworks, offering diverse views on issues such as campaign reform, racism, gender equality, gun control, reproductive rights and freedom of expression.”

We believe that artists, and art, play an important role in galvanizing our society to do better. We are frustrated with a system in which money, divisiveness, and a general lack of truth-telling have stifled complex conversation. We created the first artist-run super Pac because we believe it’s time for artists to become more involved in the political process.

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EXPO PROJECTS

EXPO Projects is presented alongside IN/SITU in and around Navy Pier, featuring a curated selection of projects organized by EXPO CHICAGO. The site-specific installation program highlights large-scale and performative works by emerging and established artists represented by 2016 Exhibitors.

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The Son of a Gigant [2003] – by Magdalena Abakanowicz
Courtesy of Marlborough, New York, London, Madrid, Barcelona.

 Magdalena Abakanowicz emerged as an artist in a Poland devastated by World War II. The politically charged but emotional work reminds us of the nature of the human condition, its inherent impermanence rendered immutable. Her recent solo exhibitions include the Palacio de Cristal, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid and the Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (IVAM), Valencia, both in 2008.

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Hold It Up To The Light [2016] – by Cody Hudson
Courtesy of ANDREW RAFACZ, Chicago.

Cody Hudson presents a new site-specific installation of wall painting and sculpture. extending his uniquely abstracted forms sourced from the human figure, recently developed in his solo exhibition Dreams Burn Down at ANDREW RAFACZ. Hudson presents his large scale installation exclusively for EXPO Chicago audience.

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48 Portraits [Underexposed] [2012] – by Samuel Levi Jones
Courtesy of PATRON, Chicago.

The series of portraits respond to the realted issues of representation and exclusion raised by a Gerhard Richter installation from 1972 – the same year the encyclopedia set was published. Richter’s 48 portraits, made for the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale, depected icons of Western culture from 19th and 20th centuries, each a white male. here Jones includes 48 African American cultural figures who did not appear in the 1972 edition of the encyclopedia: Bessie Smith, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marian Anderson, Nina Simone, Duke Ellington, James Baldwin, Langston Huges and George Washington Carver among them. The enlarged close-ups of their faces, printed on sheets of paper, barely emerge from the rich charcoal gray ground.

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Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness [1995] – by Alfredo Jaar
Courtesy of Human Rights Watch.

Human Rights Watch [HRW], a leading international human rights organization dedicated to defending and promoting human rights around the world, in partnership of Rhona Hoffman Gallery, presents Chilean born artist, architect, filmmaker and activist Alfredo Jaar’s “teach Us to Outgrow Our Madeness”. Created specifically for EXPO Chicago, and inspired by writings of Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe, Jaar’s piece highlights the responsibility of each generation to learn from those who came before us. At once urgent and optimistic, the piece reflects the organization’s mission to protect human dignity wherever it is threatened.

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Warp [2016] – by Anna Kunz
Courtesy of McCormick Gallery, Chicago.

Anna Kunz is a Chicago-based painter that makes work that explores the intersection of the formal aspects of the media she uses, and the qualities of the surrounding space. Often, painted and dyed fabrics function like nets to capture and manipulate light and color. These experiential works are often combined with objects or surfaces that invite viewers to interact with the works in space. Her large scale painting process intertwines performance, installation, sculpture, and architecture.

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Mother Earth Constructivist, 2015 / The Beginning of Everything, 2016 / Henri, 2015 / Carl, 2015.
Courtesy of GRIMM | Amsterdam.

Combining Surrealist and Minimalist forms in his sculpture, van Lieshout examines the boundary between art, architecture, and human constructions. This selection belongs to the CryptoFuturism series, which revisits the tenets of Italian Futuristism a century later to highlight resonances between emerging Fascist tendencies today. These four works, from the origin of matter, material, and form that inspired The Beginning of Everything, which represents the molecular makeup of Glucose (C6H1206), to Henri and Carl—cubist, functional sculptures in a style the artist refers to as “nouveau brutalism” — van Lieshout couples the pursuit of progress with a longing for the primitive past. This contrast between primitivism and constructivism is a thematic shared with Mother Earth Constructivist, whose form marks a return to the origins of sculpture, from primitive totems and fertility statues—placed on an abstract, geometrical pedestal, the work is reminiscent of Modernist sculpture from the early twentieth century—an era of great Utopian movements, not unlike our own. Presented with support from the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York.

 

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Wall Grapheme 3, 2016 – by Matt Magee
Acrylic and china marker
Courtesy of THE MISSION | Chicago.

Wall Grapheme 3 continues a series of site specific wall paintings Magee began at Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque in May 2016. A grapheme is the smallest semantically distinguishing unit in written language—building on this idea, Magee creates his own encoded and sequenced vocabulary suspended within a grid relating to Agnes Martin’s ‘On a clear day’ screenprint edition from 1973.

 

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American Bikers [1990-95] – by Sandro Miller
Courtesy of Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago.

The spring of 1990, artist Sandro Miller attended a biker rally sponsored by Harley-Davidson dealership in his hometown of Elgin, Illinois. This rally was organized to raise money for a local residential facility which also provided medically oriented services to children and young adults with severe disabilities. During the next five years Miller attended biker rallies across America, and photographed bikers around the country. The series illuminates the group of people who have so often been categorized and demeaned by American public.

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because mountains are so high [2016] – by Sabina Ott
Courtesy of Hyde Park Art Center & Aspect / Ratio Gallery, Chicago.

Sabina Ott’s site-specific installation for EXPO Chicago acts as an alternate passageway – a space to meander through and lose oneself in wonderment. Smells, sounds, objects and video is used to create an immersive artificial enviornment. The work is an extension of Ott’s exhibition at Hype Park Art Center.

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Yuansu Series II – by Ren Ri / Beewax sculpture
Courtesy of Pearl Lam Galleries, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore.

Ren Ri’s work is signified by the very special medium he uses: beeswax. Considered an unusual and difficult material to work with, Ri’s understanding of bees’ psychology and nature assist him in his creative process. He works in collaboration with insects to create his mesmerizing sculptures. To manipulate natural processes, the artist must find a balance cooperating with nature to accomplish his artistic goals. Ri was born in 1984 in Harbin, China, and studied Fine Art at Tsinghua University before receiving his Masters at Saint-Petersburg Herzen State University, Russia. He has a PhD in Fine Art from Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing.

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Mr. Risky [2016] – by Adam Parker Smith
Courtesy of The Hole, New York.

Consisting of a humanoid stack of resinated mylar balloons—weightless in appearance, but quite solid— the sculpture’s illusion of buoyancy mimics the dynamism of classical sculpture that somehow makes marble look like striving human bodies, and perhaps deflates that idea. While the artist is inspired by classical works like Augustus of Primaporta, the Artemision Bronze, the Venus de Milo or Winged Victory, to contemporary eyes the works evoke perhaps a sagging Koons balloon sculpture, or a birthday array the morning after

 

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IN/SITU
Spencer Finch – Sky Over Coney Island [2004].
Victoria Fu – Egg [2016].
Amalie Jakobsen – Recursive Demarcation [2016].
Shana Lutker – The Dream That Woke Up [2016].
Jillian Mayer – Slumpie 9 – Knee Hole [2016].
Rodney McMillian – Carpet Painting [2012].
Julio Cesar Morales – Works from the Narco Headlines Series [2015].
Battina Pousttchi – Rotunda [2016].
Carlos Rolon / Dzine – Nomadic Habitat [2015] For Freedoms

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EXPO Projects
Magdalena Abakanowicz – The Son of Gigant [2003].
Kimathi Donkor
Cody Judson – Hold It Up to the Light [2016].
Alfredo Jaar – Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness [1995].
Samuel Levi Jones – 48 Portraits [2012].
Anna Kunz – Warp [2016].
Atelier van Lieshout
Dena Lixenberg – Imperial Courts [2015].
Matt Magee – Wall Grapheme 3 [2016].
Sandro Miller – American Bikers [1990-95].
Nnenna Okore – Onwa N’etilu Ora [2013-2015].
Sabina Ott – because mountains were so high [2016].
Ren Ri -Yaansu Series II [2014-2015] Adam Parker Smith – Mr. Risky [2016].
Saya Woolfalk – Color Mixing Machine [2016].

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The text is taken from EXPO Chicago website..
IN/SITU.. click here..
EXPO Projects.. click here..
Image copyright © Jyoti Srivastava.

 

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RELATED LINKS:
EXPO CHICAGO.. click here..

 

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