Cantering Loop gathers work by Fred Schmidt-Arenales, Ryann Slauson, Ruby T, Meredith Zielke, and Yoni Goldstein, and is organized by Kelsey Harrison.

Join us at 8pm for the opening June 7th for a performance by Fred Schmidt-Arenales and a lecture by Dr. Heidi J. Nast.

In this show, each artist looks at a different way that the material world influences thought. The work hints at a cantering loop—exploring the way that thought, first structured by the physical, becomes material again. There is a play of inside (where ideas are thought to live) and outside (where things are thought to live). When an object is taken in as a thought, and a thought is built again as an object, inside and outside become harder to separate. The Klein bottle, the Möbius strip’s volumetric sister, is an apt material metaphor. The Klein bottle is a one-sided surface which, if walked upon, would flip the traveler inside the volume while walking toward the point of origin. Its outside becomes its inside. It is equally true that its inside becomes its outside.

These five artists each work from inside to outside and back again: Memory becomes liquid that leaks from and reenters the body in Goldstein and Zielke’s video installation. Racism structures a city and the city’s structure perpetuates racism in Schmidt-Arenales’ performance and video work. A rug is a meeting place, a map, and a plan to resist the spatialization of wealth and power in Ruby T’s narrative installation. Objects are cathected and digested in Slauson’s sculptures.

Fred Schmidt-Arenales is an artist and documentarian currently based in New York. Fred co-produces Reconnaissance, an audio documentary project investigating the construction of narrative in political life. Current exhibitions include The Dangerous Professors at Triumph, Chicago, The New Normal (traveling), and Rotten Spring, an upcoming performance included in the Brick Theater’s Not Normal Festival. Fred will pursue an MFA at the University of Pennsylvania starting in August, 2017

Ryann Slauson is a Brooklyn based interdisciplinary artist and organizer working in sculpture, painting, poetry, and video. In her work, Slauson explores the emotional attachment we have to mundane or discarded objects. She works with simple and sometimes salvaged materials to replicate things from the world with earnest and intense care.
Ruby T is an artist based in Chicago. Her work is an experiment in translating fantasy to reality, and she is fueled by anger, desire, and magic. Through drawing, collage, video, and object-making, she investigates the stimulating, banal, and often infrastructural as sites of power and exchange: nightclubs, domestic appliances, google image search results, broadcast news, brutalist architecture, sex.

Meredith Zielke is an award-winning Chicago-based filmmaker, cinematographer and conceptual artist whose work offers multi-sited interpretations of social systems, environments, and rituals. Meredith works primarily in documentary, experimental films, and video installation.

Yoni Goldstein is an Israeli-born, Chicago-based filmmaker, installation artist, and cinematographer whose experimental cinema and video artworks explore sacred sites, landscapes, and systems. He has gone on to work on a number of nonfiction films concerning body and power: from examining hybridized healing practices in the Northern Andes (“La Curación”), to life sentences for children in US prisons (“Natural Life”), to large-scale tableaux of historical and somatic memory (“The Jettisoned”).

Kelsey Harrison is a Chicago based sculptor. She uses craft and architecture vernaculars to investigate the way form and material “speak”, and the way we understand our social roles from city planning, from architecture, from furniture, from joinery, from material.

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Tags: Ballroom Projects, Bridgeport, Cantering Loop, Chicago, Fred Schmidt-Arenales, Kelsey Harrison, Meredith Zielke, Ruby T, Ryann Slauson, Yoni Goldstein