Chicago Artists Coalition is pleased to present, As gesture, a HATCH exhibition featuring work by artists-in-residence, Ashley Freeby and Gina Hunt.

The exhibition opens on Friday, May 17, 2019 with a reception from 5-8 pm.

In Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, he wrote that “the purpose of the spectacle is to make history forgotten within culture.” Yet forces of culture and society challenge the notion of history, or collective memory, continuously. The main challenging force is the gesture – the technical movement of the hand or body, the capturing or recreation of a moment long- lost, the memory that moves into the realm of reality. In the exhibition As gesture, Ashley Freeby and Gina Hunt reintroduce that movement and sensation through labor intensive and thoughtfully mapped works with an attention to presenting a contemplative moment. Using tools of the narrative and theater, a history is constructed and remembered. The intentionality of circumstantial elements can reimagine and reinterpret current realities. Exploring identity, illusion, and memory as an open system of connected and performed gestures in this collaboration, we regain the power to navigate and experience traditions, transmissions, and transference within perceived and lived moments naturally occurring around us.

Always mapping, tracing or marking, Ashley Freeby’s process is translating an image or event from a certain point in time. In past works like “…writing his dream inside a rectangle,” the artist traces and represents the rectangular patch of asphalt that was the site of Michael Brown’s death with hand- painted gravel and the simple shape itself. Moving into new territory, Freeby experiments how creating earth through new forms, new materials, and new environments memorializes the victim in a special way. Exploring “earth monuments” through similar layered ways of working in the past, natural elements are the components of beautifully, vulnerable and sensitive sculptural segments. With equal attention to the technical, historical, and illusional, Gina Hunt helps shed light on the possibilities of our visual experiences in our current moment and space. In past series such as Transmitters, Hunt has manipulated materials, such as colored scrim and twisted canvas, to reimagine their visual realities. Now pushing her work beyond greater boundaries, Hunt is constructing a Color Space Modulator, a multi-panel painting creating a stage for the expansion of performative experiences of color and light, with inspiration from one of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s famous works. Circumstantial elements created by the artist through theater techniques such as the use of lighting and color projections, are the small gestures that push forward and help us reconsider histories of the systems and meanings in the world around us.

As gesture is curated by Alexis Brocchi.

image: Gina Hunt, Color Space Modulator (installation detail), 2019, Color gels, LEDs, acrylic, cut canvas, maple, 66” x 14′ x 8′ (approximate)

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Tags: Alexis Brocchi, As gesture, Ashley Freeby, Chicago, Chicago Artists' Coalition, Gina Hunt, West Town