NEW CAPITAL is happy to announce TANNATT/ SCHWARTZ our final exhibition in our 3114 W. Carroll location before 24HRS/25DAYS begins:

What are the realms of being that allow familiarity in the surreal? Elegantly absurd and absurdly elegant Mindy Rose Schwartz and Mateo Tannatt force scenes that you must believe but cannot reason.

While toying with the embarrassing and mysterious power of personification, Mindy Rose Schwartz makes the figure into forms that are everything but human. Unfolding like idiosyncratic bends of a compact Zen garden, small areas of the downstairs boiler room are marked with sculptures that mirror more than our own image.

Surrounded by a cat’s cradle of string and trails of colored sand that tour the annals of popular American craft gone-by, a svelte spine curves into an arched trellis that marks the passage of an unidentifiable (though almost palpable) metaphysical boundary. Schwartz makes many such boundaries, and passages, totally relatable and totally weird, detectable only by feel.

The journey through Schwartz’s landscape is obliterated upstairs by Mateo Tannatt’s comical and exhausting monolith, the other end of absurd. There is nowhere to go, except around, and around again.

The 5’ x 5’ x 10’ sculpture is completed by a 10 piece ensemble atop it, performing a 5 minute improvisation, repeated for 5 minutes (performed once during opening night). The object cycles through identities not usually shared by one thing; minimalist mega cube, stage, pedestal, inducing memory and imagination as much as the moment; an experience resembling music or at least, composition. In its entirety, the piece is its own coup, continuously undoing, continuously provoking, and ephemeral though never shifting an inch.

Round a corner of this work is a video made from footage of the iconic ‘piano drop’ made real, signature of Tannatt’s relentless and evocative humor.

Chicago/New York-based artist Mindy Rose Schwartz has shown her sculpture and installations throughout the United States with exhibitions in Houston, TX; Brooklyn, NY; St. Louis and Kansas City, MO; Miami, FL and Chicago. She has just received the 2012 Achievement Award from the Helen Coburn Meier and Tim Meier Foundation.

Her work has been written about in artnet Magazine, Beautiful Decay (online), Time Out Chicago, The Chicago Tribune, Newcity, ArtForum, Frieze Magazine, Art in America and Whitewalls. She was the recipient of a 3Arts Fellowship to Ragdale in 2010 and a Frankel Foundation Full Fellowship Award to the Vermont Studio Center
in 2005. Schwartz earned her MFA at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

Los Angeles-based artist Mateo Tannatt (b. 1979, Los Angeles) works in a variety of media and frequently collaborates with other artists. His most recent solo exhibition ‘Instrumental Music” opened at Marc Foxx earlier this year. His work was included in the exhibition ‘All of This and Nothing’ at the Hammer Museum, LA, in 2011. When Attitude becomes Form Becomes Attitude, Wattis Institute for the Arts, San Francisco, 2012. Art Parcours, Art Basel, 2012

New Capital is open on Sundays from 1- 4 pm and by appointment at newcapitalprojects@gmail.com

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Tags: East Garfield Park, Mateo Tannatt, Mindy Rose Schwartz