Across a growing body of work, Isabelle Frances McGuire turns to figures that loom large in the cultural imagination or those that keep reappearing, sometimes against all odds, whether a president and moral exemplar such as Abraham Lincoln, classic monsters like Frankenstein, or the fame-destined ingénue of A Star is Born, a movie that has been remade many times. McGuire embraces these apparent archetypes and the stories they keep generating, often giving them a new uncanny life or a kind of feral energy.

McGuire’s exhibition at the Renaissance Society began by thinking about the lasting lionization of Lincoln and the symbolic relics associated with him, but it expands from there to think about other origin stories and different forms of re-enactment. Picking up on the looping repetitions and regressions in today’s culture and politics—populated by characters both real and imagined—McGuire tests out different approaches to recreating the past, re-animating old models, or revisiting persistent symbols.

On a material level, McGuire’s work takes shape as technology meets and mediates history’s lingering specters, especially in their pop culture guises. With the learn-it-and- do-it spirit of an engineer, the Chicago-based artist creates sculptures, installations, and props for videos using technologies such as 3D printing and computer-controlled milling based on digital models. At times, McGuire also uses DIY methods like “modding” and “kitbashing,” in which existing models are altered or combined to make new forms, borrowing techniques from gaming culture as readily as from the history of art.

At the heart of the exhibition is a full-scale replica of Abraham Lincoln’s birth cabin, made using dozens of foam logs, cut by an automated CNC machine based on a 3D digital model and then hand-painted by the artist. The Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park, in Kentucky, memorializes the place where Lincoln was born, but the cabin appearing there—now known as the “Symbolic Birth Cabin”—is in fact just a similar cabin from the time, meaning the “original” is a replica in its own right. Nearby, a series of tall banners—bright pink with silver stars—span one long wall, recreating the backdrop from a spectacular scene in the 1954 version of a Star Is Born, directed by George Cukor during Hollywood’s “Golden Age.”

While these first works allude to absent characters, others introduce familiar figures who are displaced from their usual settings. Lincoln’s empty cabin is joined at a distance by sculptures of two other “good men,” their prone bodies translated into physical form from anonymous 3D medical scans. McGuire also occupies various spaces outside of the gallery itself: The institution’s hallway display cases feature a video of “Frankenstein in the Underworld”, which McGuire shot in a sprawling abandoned sub- basement at the University of Chicago. And the exhibition poster, visible in other display cases on the floors below the Ren, features a new photograph by the artist that thinks about their own “origin story,” recreating a scene from thirty years ago.

As an assembled group, the varied works in Year Zero use digital processes to give shape to material sculptures, while alluding to a dissonant array of stories past that have been told and retold over the years. Two public events during the run of the exhibition will further activate these ideas, a temporary occupation of Lincoln’s cabin by the band Suicide Moi, and an intimate presentation by Betsy Ross, famous for sewing the first American flag (or rather by a living history actor).

Curated by Karsten Lund.

Friends of Isabelle Frances McGuire Patron Circle as of October 2024: Murat Ahmed & Katherine Mackenzie, and Zach Smith.

Major annual support for the Renaissance Society is provided by the Mellon Foundation. Annual support is provided by the Provost’s Discretionary Fund at the University of Chicago. The Renaissance Society programs are partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.

The 2024–2025 Music Series is generously sponsored by a grant from the University of Chicago Women’s Board.

All Renaissance Society publications are made possible by The Mansueto Foundation Publications Program.

About the Artist

Isabelle Frances McGuire (b. 1994, Austin, Texas) lives and works in Chicago. Selected solo and two person presentations include What Pipeline (Detroit, MI), King’s Leap (New York, NY), Scherben (Berlin, DE), Mickey (Chicago, IL), Good Weather at Et al. (San Francisco, CA), From The Desk of Lucy Bull (Los Angeles, CA), and Prairie (Chicago, IL). Recent group shows include High Art & Sister (Seoul, KR), Artists Space (New York, NY), Petzel Gallery (New York, NY), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (Chicago, IL), Bel Ami (Los Angeles, CA), shore (Vienna, AT), M. LeBlanc (Chicago, IL), In Lieu (Los Angeles, CA), and Alyssa Davis Gallery (New York, NY).

Events:

Opening Reception Sat, Sep 14, 4-7pm

Exhibition Walkthrough
With the artist and curator Karsten Lund Thu, Jan 9, 6pm

Performance Suicide Moi Sat, Jan 18, 7pm

Suicide Moi is a collaborative art and music project featuring Isabelle Frances McGuire, Liz Vitlin, and Julian Flavin. Its name is borrowed from an album of poetry by Jean Baudrillard, recorded live at Whiskey Pete’s Casino in 1996, on which the French philosopher is backed by an all-star band. This band isn’t that band, but it appreciates the slippage between reality and simulacrum no less. For one day only, Suicide Moi occupies McGuire’s exhibition, becoming a new animating force, live in the present tense. The group’s debut album, Anastasia, is set to be released this year.

Discussion
Betsy Ross Talks to the Renaissance Society Sat, Feb 8, 3pm
Swift Hall, Third Floor, 1025 E 58th St

Betsy Ross is known for sewing the first American flag and aiding in the design of its original thirteen stars and thirteen stripes, following a visit from George Washington to her upholstery shop in Philadelphia. While this meeting took place in 1776, and didn’t leave a paper trail, the story only reached a larger public almost a century later as the country’s centennial drew near. Held up as a patriotic role model and a national icon, her legend has only grown over time. For this afternoon event, Betsy Ross joins us in person.

Visit renaissancesociety.org for more information.

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Tags: Chicago, Hyde Park, Isabelle Frances McGuire, Isabelle Frances McGuire: Year Zero, Renaissance Society, University of Chicago, Year Zero