Coriolis Effect brings together three artists, Lisa Walcott, Sarah Mendelsohn and Fred Schmidt-Arenales. In preparation for this exhibition, the three artists connected via phone as Mendelsohn and Schmidt-Arenales performed a work previously presented at the ACRE residency in summer 2013 from their living room in Chicago, with Walcott listening in from Michigan. Though this experience itself is not presented in the gallery, it has provided a framework for the exhibition.

Mendelsohn and Schmidt-Arenales are collaborating on a long-term, multilayered project; its previous iteration was presented this January during the Extinct Entities Festival. In their work, Sarah and Fred move between performance, video, and painting, while using writing as a common thread. However, this thread does not tie their work into one continuous fabric, but rather opens it up to the multiplicity of overwriting, reading and performing. As viewers, we are challenged to meet territorial and cultural margins; open subjective constructions that yet point back to political vortexes.

Walcott’s work exists in moments that may be defined as the classic Unheimlich, the familiar (and the familial), that has estranged. Using common objects, she produces sculptures that encapsulate fragments of subdued scenarios. Often including a kinetic element, their trapped movement points out something hidden, but does not expose what is concealed.

The exhibition will operate as a stage for a confrontational encounter between heterogeneous forces that insist upon one thing – an actual abstraction.

The term, Coriolis Effect, comes from physics, and refers to a deflection of moving objects when they are viewed in a rotating reference frame; one common rotating frame is the planet earth. When we consider the constant movement of things, steady reflection is inconceivable.

The exhibition will host exclusive film screenings by the Israeli artist, Roee Rosen, and the Viennese artist, Friedemann Derschmidt. This will be the first Chicago public screening of these films. Also, it will present performances by Sarah Mendelsohn and Fred Schmidt-Arenales and Heather MacKenzie.

See Below For Programming Schedule.

Sarah Mendelsohn and Fred Schmidt-Arenales are artists currently living in Chicago. Their collaborative work reflects each of their independent practices, within both of which writing plays a central role. Shared concerns include how to write into pre-existing narratives—actively, fluidly—and how to interpret the right to expression. She graduated from the University of Chicago with a BA in Visual Arts and Anthropology in 2012. He graduated from the University of Chicago with a BA in Theater and Performance Studies in 2013. In 2013, Mendelsohn and Schmidt-Arenales participated in the ACRE Residency in Steuben, Wisconsin, and presented work together at Hundred Forsyth, New York, and numerous venues in Chicago.

Lisa Walcott is a Midwest based installation artist and kinetic sculptor. She received her MFA in Sculpture from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2010, and has since created and exhibited her work nationally including Land of Tomorrow in Louisville, KY, COOP Gallery in Nashville, TN and The Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum in East Lansing, MI. Her work explores mundane, extracted moments from familiar spaces giving lyricism to the unseen and visual articulation to the unsaid.

Special events during Coriolis Effect

Sun Feb 23, 2014

7pm – Performance, Sarah Mendelsohn and Fred Schmidt-Arenales, I think about it every day: Big Muddy

Sat Mar 1, 2014

4pm – Performance, Sarah Mendelsohn and Fred Schmidt-Arenales, I think about it every day: Big Muddy

4:45pm – Screening: Roee Rosen, The Confessions of Roee Rosen, 2008 (See information below).

Sun Mar 2, 2014

5pm – Performance, Sarah Mendelsohn and Fred Schmidt-Arenales, I think about it every day: Big Muddy

6pm – Screening, Friedemann Derschmidt, The Phantom of Memory, 2011(See information below).

Sat Mar 8, 2014

3pm – Screening, Friedemann Derschmidt, The Phantom of Memory, 2011,

4:30pm – Screening, Roee Rosen, The Confessions of Roee Rosen, 2008

Sun Mar 9, 2014

6:30pm – Performance, Heather MacKenzie

7pm – Performance, Sarah Mendelsohn and Fred Schmidt-Arenales, I think about it every day: Big Muddy

Roee Rosen (http://roeerosen.com), born 1963, is an Israeli-American artist, filmmaker and writer. He heads the advanced visual arts program at Ha’Midrasha Art College, in Israel, and teaches at the Bezalel Art Academy in Jerusalem. Rosen’s painting and text installation, Live and Die as Eva Braun (1995-1997), stirred a scandal when first exhibited at the Israel Museum. It was later recognized as groundbreaking in its approach to the representation of the Holocaust. Rosen dedicated many years to his fictive, feminine persona, the Jewish-Belgian Surrealist painter and pornographer Justine Frank, a project that entailed fabricating her entire oeuvre as well as writing biographical and theoretical text about her, and the novel she supposedly authored. Rosen’s book, Justine Frank, Sweet Sweat (Sternberg Press) was listed as one of the best books of 2009 by Artforum magazine. ACRE Projects will screen Rosen’s video, The Confessions of Roee Rosen (2008). The video’s central work features three illegal female foreign workers who deliver in turn a monologue conveying the artist’s fantasies and histories – his “confessions.” Feeding on the morphology of commercial cinema, the other related works are a trailer, a bonus track and a gag reel. Confessions premiered at the FIDMarseille festival, where it won a special mention, and was later shown worldwide, among other places at Manifesta 7, in Italy.

Friedemann Derschmidt (http://memscreen.info/) born 1969, is a video artist, researcher and educator. He holds a professorial position in the Academy of fine Art in Vienna. For the last 12 years he runs together with Karin Schneider the Ritesinstitute – as an independent studio and curatorial organization – through it they developed multiple collaborative art- and research-projects and art works in the open space. In 2010, Derschmidt founded together with Tal Adler, Karin Schneider and Attila Kosa the art based research project MemScreen. His piece, The Phantom of Memory, 2011, revolves around an Israeli poet Ilana Shmueli that is being filmed researching memory. Shmueli investigates her own memory of a story that happened, as she puts it, “at the margins of the Holocaust”; and she has some astonishing findings.

Heather MacKenzie is an interdisciplinary artist and a weaver. Explorations of traditional textiles have led Heather to live in Ecuador, Ghana, India and Zimbabwe where she has studied, worked, and often lived with local artisans. With etymology as one of her muses, she interrogates the material and abstract structures and systems in which we participate, seeking to challenge our ideas around abundance, logic, and waste. She received her BA from Brown University, and she is currently pursuing her MFA in Fiber and Material Studies at SAIC.

Official Website

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Tags: ACRE, Fred Schmidt-Arenales, Lisa Walcott, Pilsen, Ruslana LICHTZIER, Sarah Mendelsohn