Imaginary Landscapes
@ Mana Contemporary
Chicago Urban Art Society Satellite Space, 2233 S Throop St, Chicago, IL 60608
Opening Saturday, April 4th, from 6PM - 9PM
On view through Saturday, May 30th
Lisa Alvarado
Robert Burnier
Assaf Evron
Caroline Kent
Curated by Allison Glenn
Imaginary Landscapes is a group exhibition that raises questions about the uncertainty of physical space and history as they relate to knowledge of time, and the affect of time on memory. Approaching mark making with an understanding of this rupture, Lisa Alvarado, Robert Burnier, Assaf Evron and Caroline Kent ascribe painterly gestures to sculptural forms, and photographic theory to sculpture. Through the manipulation and reconstruction of symbols, forms, language, and systems, this uncertainty is challenged and considered.
Within Lisa Alvarado’s paintings, shamanistic tradition collides with a critical inquiry of cultural appropriation and assimilation. The repeated motifs found in her work are often sourced from the history of spiritual and sacred traditions of invisible cultures. The relationship of history to the image and object is a recurrent theme within the work of Assaf Evron, particularly as it relates to Aby Warberg’s “Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America”. Working from a photograph of Hopi architecture taken by Warburg, Evron isolates a repeated pattern and reproduces it into sculptural form. Oscillating between photographic and sculptural representations, Evron achieves an end result that is both formally and conceptually rigorous. Robert Burnier’s painted aluminum sculptures push the limits of the medium through the deconstruction of recognizable shapes, such as a shipping crate. Dwelling on ideas of failed utopias and the impossibility of communion with the absolute, Burnier’s crumbled sculptures, a rejection of the minimalist art object, are informed by Esperanto, mathematics, and computer science. Combing narrative, collage, and painting, Caroline Kent complicates the normative methods of biographical storytelling with a practice rooted in the historied language of abstract painting. Kent conflates Romanian phonology, architecture and the landscape into abstractions that communicate the subjective reality and existential experience of what it means to be an outsider in another country. Addressing myriad interpretations of the body in public space.
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Tags: Allison Glenn, Assaf Evron, Caroline Kent, Chicago Urban Art Society, Imaginary Landscapes, Lisa Alvarado, Mana Contemporary, robert burnier
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