A Momentary Lapse of Reason
Saturday, November 19th
7pm Opening
9pm Stephen Lichty in Conversation with Kelly Kaczynski

What if you could stick your hand out and touch the thin film of vision before you? And what if it was met with no resistance? (Keep pushing). A film is a screen is a veil. The distance between material presence and trust is an ever-changing negotiation. How do we know to trust?

Public Access presents A Momentary Lapse of Reason, an exhibition including works by Kelsey Harrison, Stephen Lichty, Steve Reinke and Susanne M. Winterling. Exploring the potential for perceptual ruptures created by material infidelities and alternative sensory modes, this exhibition asks: how we know what we are looking at, and how do we know to trust it? The works included in this exhibition consider how we accumulate knowledge––through perceptual, visual, historical or social means––and the capacity that knowledge has to betray us. Taken as a whole, these works invite the viewer to wonder what might lie beyond the boundaries of our perception. Curated by Abbye Churchill.

Kelsey Harrison (b. 1989 California) is an artist living and working in Chicago. Her work investigates the potential for (and in) misrecognition of form through the abstraction, hand-reproduction, warping, and excerpting of architectural elements. Her work has been shown in institutions nationally including The Jewish Museum, Abrons Art Center, and The Knockown Center in New York, SOMArts in San Francisco, and The College of William and Mary in Virginia. She was the recipient of the PSGA Public Art Grant at SUNY Purchase, and was a 2014-15 resident at Brooklyn Wayfarers Studio Residency, as well as the School of Making Thinking and Peters Valley. Harrison received her BFA in Sculpture from Purchase College, State University of New York in 2014 and is currently completing her MFA in Sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Stephen Lichty (b. 1983 Kansas City) is an artist living and working in New York. Lichty’s sculptures have been exhibited at Foxy Production (NY), The Noguchi Museum (NY), CAPITAL (SF), New Capital (CHI), Night Gallery (LA), and Frutta (Rome), while he has performed at The Noguchi Museum (NY) Two Slow Falls, Neutra VDL Research House presented by PG4S (LA), Diakron (Copenhagen) Keeping Dusk, and ODC (SF) Special Effects.

Steve Reinke is an artist and writer, best known for his video essays. He has screened at many festivals, including the Berlinale, Rotterdam, Sundance and New York Film Festival and many exhibitions including the 2014 Whitney Biennial. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Centre Pompidou (Paris), National Gallery (Ottawa) and MACBA (Barcelona). He is associate professor of Art, Theory, Practice at Northwestern University. His work is distributed by the Video Data Bank (Chicago) and Argos (Brussels) and represented by Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi (Berlin)​.

Susanne M. Winterling (b. 1970, Rehau/Oberfranken, Germany) investigates the dichotomy of inside and outside, bodily and chemical, urban and rural through various mediums. Winterling studied philosophy and art history at the Akademie Isotrop, Hamburg and Fine Art in Hamburg and Braunschweig until 2005. She has exhibited widely, recently at e-flux (New York), The Cologne Room (Los Angeles), Kunsthalle Lingen (Germany), and Center for Contemporary Art Prishtina (Republic of Kosovo). Winterling lives and works in Oslo and Berlin.

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Tags: Chicago, Humbodt Park, Kelly Kaczynski, Kelsey Harrison, Public Access, Stephen Lichty, Steve Reinke, Susanne M. Winterling