Dear Public, We are excited to invite you to the first installment of an exhibition titled 12 Openings, a yearlong experiment in collaborative curation with unpredictable results.

Over the course of the year there will be 12 shows, each having its own two titles, culminating in a group show of 24 artists.

Each month two artists are invited to install an artwork in or around the home of Laura Shaeffer, Andrew Nord, and their sons Sebastian and Jasper, making the private public and extending our understanding of home, family, and community. Both artists are then asked to extend the invitation to one more artist to do the same, thus adding two more works, and two more show titles each month. Each new artwork multiplies the connections between the existing artworks and, overall, constructs a cumulative exhibition that subverts the traditional top-down nature of curating exhibitions, replacing it with a model of artist-driven co-curation. The narrative arc of the show is not predetermined, but rather built upon the robust and crisscrossing networks of artists in this collaborative city. 12 Openings showcases the artists that other artists are curious about and allows these connections to shine as the exhibition grows. At the end of the run, the 12th opening, viewers will be able to see 24 original works by 24 artists, selected and inspired by their peers.

We are thrilled to announce our second participating artists and their titles:

Xiaoqing Zhu
Eight Attempts

Description: Interested in the potential movements exist in between human body and
objects, Xiaoqing Zhu used a 25-inch white cloth testing with a pine tree. By applying
repetitive actions – casting and gathering the white cloth on the tree, Zhu attempted to
humanize moving objects, mechanize human actions and exchange the role of action
sender and receiver. With eight different action attempts, she intended to find rhythms
between natural motions and artificial movements. Documentation of the performance is
considered as a functional result of non-functioning movements.

Bio: Xiaoqing Zhu is a multidisciplinary artist, born and raised in Beijing, China, and
currently based in Chicago. Xiaoqing Zhu graduated from the Central Academy of Fine
Arts in 2014 with a BA in painting and completed her MFA in printmedia at the School of
the Art Institute of Chicago in 2017. Using video, installation, performance, photography
and printmaking, Xiaoqing’s creations challenge the expected functionality of objects and
human body, and explore the correlation between human activity and urban environment.
Xiaoqing has presented her work at the Currents New Media 2018, Santa Fe, New Mexico
(2018), 88th Exhibition of the Professional Members, The Arts Club of Chicago, IL (2018),
the14th Regional Juried Exhibition, Freeport Art Museum, Chicago, IL (2017), Moments in
Time, The Art Center Highland Park, Chicago, IL (2017), Abstract Mind, CICA Museum
and Streetlight, Romansusan Gallery, Chicago, IL (2017). She has been selected as
Arquetopia Special International Summer Residency Program, Puebla, Southern Mexico
(2016), Vermont Studio Center Residency Fellowship, Vermont, VT (2018), and an
upcoming Atlantic Center For the Arts, Florida, Miami (2018).

https://www.zhu-xiaoqing.com/

Lindsey Dorr-Niro

About
Lindsey Dorr-Niro is an artist and educator currently living and working in Chicago, Illinois. She holds her MFA from The Yale School of Art and BFA from The University of Wisconsin-Madison.

A Statement of Intent
Art can be a practice of critical consciousness — both calling us deeper into ourselves and into the world in order to more effectively engage, adapt to, and transform the conditions of that world.

I believe that artists have a responsibility to expand consciousness. To this end, I aim to create diverse contemplative platforms and spaces that slow us down enough to actually see and engage what it is we are experiencing. Through this kind of active vision, viewers are invited to reframe and reorient themselves, finding new ways of being in and for the world.

All of my work insists on agency, whether its focus is a space, a found object, a durational piece, painting, digital projection, installation, or text. The work cultivates in the viewer a desire to imagine or enact processes and relations of connection, modulation, and transformation, disrupting and reorganizing our vision and being in a way that enables us to see, imagine, and be differently — facilitating an embodied, contemplative, and ecstatic alternative to the unsustainable conditions of our contemporary landscape.

http://www.lindseydorrniro.com/About-Intent

Official Website

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Tags: 12 Openings Part 2: Xiaoqing Zhu and Lindsey Dorr-Niro, Compound Yellow, Illinois, Lindsey Dorr-Niro, Oak Park, Xiaoqing Zhu