ACRE and DEFIBRILLATOR GALLERY present an opening reception on Saturday, February 21 at 7 PM at 1463 W Chicago Ave, Chicago, IL. ACRE has partnered with DEFIBRILLATOR GALLERY to host DAO NGUYEN & TOM FRIEL // FIVE STEPS TO HELL WITH POVERTY, the next installment in ACRE’s year-long series of solo exhibitions by 2013 ACRE summer residents.

ACRE is a residency program that endeavors to provide opportunities for its alumni – in this case, Dao Nguyen and Tom Friel. The opening will include an interactive installation by Nguyen and a live performance by Friel. The closing event will include a performative artist talk by Friel and a performative lecture by Nguyen called bibliologarrhythmia. Gallery hours are at random or by appointment. Friel engages audiences as costumed characters both on screen and off. His latest multimedia project, To Hell With Poverty, is part of the nomadic collective, Sentient Avatars of Astral Collapse. Fast-paced, incendiary, and satirical, the work suggests solutions for overcoming capitalist oppression. Nguyen’s Blackbox Magik is an interactive installation at the opening event. Inside a caravan, performer Joshua Kent ritually selects and marks each visitor with a tattoo for the night. Artists Dasha Filippova, Julie Henslee, Jane Jerardi, Aya Nakamura, and Moki Tantoco created tattoo images in response to a system of prompts. is her performative lecture at the closing event.

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DAO NGUYEN Her name is a homophone for the Vietnamese word for knife. She is the compact red Leatherman multi-tool your aunt gave you for Christmas ten years ago. On sale at Marshall’s. Versatility and hidden strength in a small package at a discount. Highly functional and stealthy enough to pass through security checkpoints on three continents on four separate occasions. She can cut, screw, file, saw, and open your beer. Bonus applications include carving miniature graphite figurines, picking locks, and sculpting tofu. She choreographs thought experiments, play apparatuses, obstacle courses, rituals for mourning, remembering, and transformation, and creates elaborate systems connecting objects, gestures, and bodies, to ask philosophical questions around knowledge and existence. She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

TOM FRIEL is currently based outside of Detroit, MI. Past exhibitions have included the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Detroit, MI; Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI and Art Basel 2011, Basel, Switzerland. He has written art and social criticism for print publications and artist books, as well as caretandsticks.com and wowhuh.com. He is a regular contributor for badatsports.com. “Through performances involving video, sound and commodifiable objects sold as souvenirs, I create temporary environments which subvert the power structures of capitalism in the 21st century. I pour on color to excite the senses, engage the viewer, and create a confusion of space.”

Committed to presenting a vast range of styles and forms of performance art, Defibrillator Gallery (a.k.a. DFBRL8R) is a non-profit 501c3 arts organization dedicated to fostering local talent while invigorating Chicago with artists of exceptional calibre from around the globe. Contextualizing performance within visual art, DEFIBRILLATOR presents work by artists who look to the body, objects, space, and time for inspiration, research and practice. Dynamic programming, decidedly fearless and unique, aims to provoke thought and stimulate discourse surrounding performance art. One of only a handful of galleries worldwide who focus specifically on performance art, DFBRL8R actively contributes to a global dialog surrounding the exhibition of conceptual, ephemeral, or enigmatic forms of time-based expression. Defibrillator is partially supported by grants from the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation and The Illinois Arts Council Agency.

ACRE (Artists’ Cooperative Residency and Exhibition) was founded in 2010 with the ambition to provide the arts community with an affordable, cooperative, and dialogue-oriented residency program. The residency itself takes place each summer in rural southwest Wisconsin and brings together artists from across disciplines and levels of experience to create a regenerative community of cultural producers. Over the course of the following year ACRE endeavors to further support its residents by providing venues for exhibitions, idea exchange, interdisciplinary collaboration, and experimental projects.

More information about ACRE can be found at www.acreresidency.org

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Tags: ACRE Projects, Dao Nguyen, Defibrillator Gallery, Tom Friel