Experimental dance troupe, The Seldoms reinvigorate their program by partnering with visual artists to create unique multidisciplinary art installations that are activated by choreographed bodies. Titled Toolbox, the program pairs a dance artist with another creative practitioner to collaborate on a new combined work and share their processes, techniques and values with one another. From this conversation, the dancemaker identifies one essential word that undergirds the visual artist’s practice, and translates it to a choreographic one.

This performative installation and exhibition marks the Seldoms’ twentieth year of performance in Chicago. T”The dancer/ artist pairings include Damon Green/Sadie Woods, Sarah Gonsiorowski/Jacqueline Surdell, Carrie Hanson/Edra Soto, and Maggie Vannucci and Dee Alaba/Jackie Kazarian. This exhibition is curated and choreographed by Carrie Hanson, Director of the Seldoms in collaboration with Allison Peters Quinn, Director of Exhibitions at Hyde Park Art Center.

About Jacqueline Surdell:

Jacqueline Surdell was born and raised in Chicago, IL. Now the third largest city in the US (and the largest in the Midwest), Chicago’s history of industry, labor, and midwest grit plays a significant role in Surdell’s work. Surdell’s Polish Grandfather worked in the steel mills in Hegewisch (a neighborhood on the south side of Chicago) while her Dutch Grandmother is a landscape painter. The dichotomy established between manual labor and conceptual labor influenced Surdell at an early age. Listening to stories of the mills — the operation of massive blast furnaces, chaotic melting pits, and subsequent injuries, was complimented with memories of frolicking in wildflower fields while her grandmother painted the colorful landscape. The combination resulted in an early-developed arts view where life and work, body and labor, industry and craft, and the high-brow traditions of plein-air landscape painting, merged. Those close familial memories influence Surdell’s complex terrain between art-making, body, sanctuary and spirit.

About Sara Gonsiorowski:

Sarah is a dance artist and movement coach. She received her early training from the Milwaukee Ballet School and continued her education at the University of Iowa, receiving a BFA in Dance and a BA in English. She has worked with artists and companies including Harrison McEldowney, Carl Flink, The Moving Architects, Piel Morena Contemporary Dance, Netta Yerushalmy, Niv Sheinfeld / Oren Laor, Same Planet Performance Project, and Kristina Isabelle Dance Company. She is a strength coach at Defined Training, co-founder of The Lunge Ladies, LLC, and a fitness columnist for Uplevyl. Sarah joined The Seldoms in 2015.