Artist talk with Claudia Weber and Assaf Evron

In her work, Claudia Weber conceives of strategies that challenge our conditioned perception of and interaction with everyday spaces. In an attempt to break through the cycle in which the status quo is reinscribed into the built environment, Weber responds to selected sites with propositions that, in their ephemeral nature, should be understood as both physical and philosophical suggestions of (im)possible spaces. For her upcoming project, Weber will turn one wing of Mies van der Rohe’s McCormick House into her temporary home and studio, within which she will respond to both the building’s transformation from modernist residence to contemporary exhibition space, and the impact of this shift on the relationship between art, design and life.

Claudia Weber has shown her mixed-media works internationally, including at Lehmann Maupin Gallery, Thierry Goldberg, and White Columns, New York; CAC Bretigny (France); and Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin. She has received a year-long New York Stipend by the Federal State of Berlin, and a travel & study grant by the Jerome Foundation, among other awards. She has participated in numerous residencies, including McDowell Colony, Peterborough (NH) as well as the Workspace residency at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, NYC. As the founding editor of Plot.online, she brings together critical thinkers from a wide array of disciplines to address the narrative networks of images.

In his exhibition, Assaf Evron looks at Mies van der Rohe collages and re-activates these collage strategies and logic onto actual Mies van der Rohe buildings. Evron uses the window modules in the McCormick house as platform, applying landscape and geological imagery onto the glass and proposes an installation where the architecture and its representation merge into each other. The project poses questions of immigration, the dialectical relationship between culture and nature, and the ontological status of the architectural object.

Assaf Evron’s work investigates the nature of vision and the ways in which it reflects in socially constructed structures, where he applies photographic thinking in various two and three-dimensional media. His work has been exhibited in galleries and museums internationally. Evron holds an MA from The Cohn Institute as well as an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he currently teaches. He has received numerous awards including The Graham Foundation (2017), Israel Lottery (2017), Artis (2016), The Gerard Levy Prize (2012), The James Weinstein Fellowship from SAIC (2013), The Israeli Ministry of Culture and Education Prize for Young Artists (2010).
In the fall of 2019, he will have his first US museum solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

This exhibition is part of the Year of German-American Friendship initiated by the German Federal Foreign Office and the Goethe-Institut, and supported by the Federation of German Industries (BDI).

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Tags: Assaf Evron, Claudia Weber, Elmhurst, Elmhurst Art Museum, Goethe-Institut Chicago