Filter Photo is pleased to present Furtive, a three-person exhibition featuring work by Daniel Hojnacki, Karolis Usonis, and Krista Wortendyke, curated by Jennifer Murray at the Chicago Cultural Center‘s Michigan Avenue Galleries.

Furtive is a photography-based exhibition that explores the complexity of memory, both personal and collective. Through an examination of place, archive, and the intersection of perception and knowing, three artists ask us to reconsider what we think we know based on our past experiences, communal knowledge and memories.

Over time, the viewing public has lost the ability to connect emotionally with images, even the most horrific. In her series unmarked, Krista Wortendyke alters images from the public archive by obscuring the parts of the images that define them as historically significant and re-draws the gesture of what lays beneath, compromising the meaning of both the old and the new image. The images are presented as post-card sized to reference the original way many of these images were originally distributed – a time when atrocities such as public lynchings were celebrated in American culture. Through obscuring and re-contextualizing these unsettling images, Wortendyke asks us to refresh and reboot our collective memories and see these images with fresh eyes.

Daniel Hojnacki’s work reflects a fascination with the subjectivity of human perception and the evolution of memory and reality over time. His series Where House Used To Be retells the story of a house he never knew practicing the construction of a memory he never had. The house in question is on Bear Lake, Florida and was once a home to his great-grandparents. Their memories via photographs are all Hojnacki has to discern and tell the story of a place ambiguous and fictional to him, and ultimately us. But like waking from a dream all we are left with are glimpses and fleeting sensations, the furtive nature of memory laid bare.

Karolis Usonis began Quiver as a sort of exorcism when he came across his father’s photographic archive of mandatory army service in Khabarovsk, USSR. Through examining his father’s military archive as well as his archive of family photographs, Usonis found himself identifying with certain gestures as a gay male. By isolating and re-contextualizing the gestures found in these images into a fictional narrative within Gorbachev’s ranks, Quiver began to queer the post-Soviet, Lithuanian homophobia he grew up with, like a question left to fester. Usonis re-remembers his father’s history as a way to mend his own.

This exhibition is presented through DCASE’s ArtsSpace in-kind grant program and supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

More information about related programming for Furtive can be found on our Events page.

Exhibition Dates: February 2 – April 7, 2019
Opening Reception: February 2, 2 – 4 pm
Location: Chicago Cultural Center, Michigan Avenue Galleries | 78 East Washington
Gallery Hours: Monday – Friday, 10 am – 7 pm; Saturday – Sunday, 10 am – 5 pm

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Tags: Chicago, Chicago Cultural Center, Daniel Hojnacki, Filter Photo, Furtive, Illinois, Jennifer Murray, Karolis Usonis, Krista Wortendyke, Loop, Michigan Avenue Galleries