Efrain Lopez Gallery is pleased to announce the Chicago debut of Lisa Kirk with a solo exhibition of new works. This will be Kirk’s first show with the gallery. Highlighting the expansive breadth of Kirk’s practice, the exhibition will include installation, painting, sculpture and video.

Kirk continues her investigation of the contemporary American cultural infrastructure, her most recent work reflects the artist’s ongoing concentration, subversive visual sensibility, and sense of humor through a dynamic interlacing of representation and abstraction, texture and space, composition and narrative. A series of large-scale cyanotypes of shadows washed in Ayahuasca tea comment on the myth of the American Dream, while drawing the viewer into a spiritual meditation. Kirk calls on the history of therapeutic practices— i.e. aura purification rituals, spa culture, juicing, meditation, therapy, shamanistic healing, and religion— as forms of healing and perhaps, escapism. It is this type of conceptual framework that has drawn comparisons to the works of Joseph Beuys and the literary works of Carl Jung. Ultimately, Kirk’s practice deals with the contemporary American cultural landscape, the political history it must contend with, and an investigation into our deep and undeniable need to engage with these social phenomena. The work seeks to expose contemporary human nature as that of consumers and combatants of objects and ideas. Kirk employs her signature approach to her audience and installations by turning rooms on their heads, inverting spaces by transforming them into a theater of artifice. The results are exhibitions that challenge the spectacle of the gallery by turning the space into a fantastical staging ground for an uncanny performance of narrative theater, employing a vocabulary of references from popular culture, middle­class America, and the sentiment of nostalgia for revolt.

Lisa Kirk (b. 1967 in Newport, RI) lives and works in Hudson, New York. She holds a BFA from the School of the Visual Arts, New York and MFA from the University of California, Irvine. Kirk’s work has been exhibited extensively both internationally and domestically, including MoMA PS 1, New York; Invisible­Exports, New York; Galeria Comercial, Puerto Rico; PARTICIPANT Inc., New York; and MOT International, London. Her work has been mentioned in in The New York Times, Flash Art, Frieze, Art in America, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, and Art Review Magazine, among others. Recent projects with the gallery include Material Art Fair, Mexico City, and an upcoming solo presentation at UNTITLED Miami Beach.

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Tags: Chicago, Efrain Lopez Gallery, Happiness is an Inside Job not an Outside Job Shadow Chasing, Lisa Kirk, West Town