Devening Projects is pleased to invite you to Everso, an installation of recent work by Nashville-based artist Jodi Hays and Chicago artist and designer Katrin Schnabl. The exhibition opens Sunday, April 2nd, and continues until May 15th.

As Jodi Hays said in a recent statement about her work: “I come from gardeners, teachers, believers, sinners, moon-lighting loggers, makers, milliners, cooks, healers, pharmacists, and grocers. I come from the American South, a place where the kitchen and pharmacy are the same room. In many ways, I see my work as that same room—an expansive space for building and coming together.

Landscape and the material vocabulary of the American South influence my abstraction. I use reclaimed textiles, fabric, and cardboard. I make large-scale paintings using dyed fibers, textiles and reclaimed cardboard, that I have called a southern povera. Much like the Italian movement, there is a current of my work that calls upon the use of unconventional and humble materials. These materials serve as stand-ins for expressive marks, inviting a relationship to time. The use of humble, found materials accesses a relationship to resourceful labor, and can expand the visual lexicon of the American South.

My work is dependent on the arc of a careworn visual narrative, of ritual and repetition, often found in the worn shacks of Beverly Buchanan, the tedious work of Rosie Lee Tomkins’ (also from Arkansas) quilts, the found material of Robert Rauschenberg and astute formalism. Part of the strength of my assemblage paintings is the visual connection to a rural vernacular. It feels like where I am from: the deep rural. I collage and connect paper, fabrics and cardboard, continuing the conversation on southern work related to the narrative of craft (however abstract) and quilt piecing. The wood and aluminum strainers literally support the flat collages, transforming them into objects that elucidate a conversation on domestic labor.”

Jodi Hays is a painter who exhibits widely across the United States. Her work has been shown at Night Gallery in Los Angeles; Susan Inglett Gallery, New York; Wiregrass Museum, Stoveworks Museum, the Brooks Museum, Tiger Strikes Asteroid (GVL), Fisk University, Curb Center at Vanderbilt University, Cooper Union, Devening Projects, and more. She is a 2019 Finalist for the Hopper Prize and the recipient of grants from The Foundation for Contemporary Art, Sustainable Arts Foundation,Tennessee Arts Commission, and the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation. Residencies include The Cooper Union School of Art, Oxbow School of Art, and Vermont Studio Center. Her work is documented in catalogues and has been published in New American Painting and Hyperallergic, and positively reviewed in ArtForum International, New Art Examiner, Number Inc. Magazine, the Nashville Scene and Two Coats of Paint. Her paintings can be found in many public and corporate collections including the Birmingham Museum of Art, The J Crew Group, Nashville International Airport, National Parks of America, Gordon College, the Tennessee State Museum, among others. She lives and works in Nashville, Tennessee.

The suite of new sculptural work by Katrin Schnabl featured in Everso is referred to collectively as Chronic. We encounter sculpture incorporating steel, wire, fabric and found objects as media for exploring ideas that embody and reflect on the interplay of inner conflicts and outer projections.

Chronic started as the working title of a series of sculptural installations with soft coverings. These sensory environments may resemble garments, or even function as such, yet their primary purpose is to translate, decode and speak to energetic and emotional processes, imbalances and disruptions. Chronic invisible illness is the starting point for this body of work. Schnabl’s recent research has been on invisible disability and the psychosocial efforts of stepping into the world. Additionally, she is researching sensory processing, molecular sciences, brain research, personal beliefs, cultural stigma and forms of healing.

The membranes of her sculptures relate to inner struggles and outer edges, partial collapses and tension; to processing the effects of mental duress, and the efforts to recover and cope. She is visualizing sheaths of emotion and energy, and their dynamic interplay. Interested in the dual function of permeability and protection in light of the enormous strength required to hold up protective rigidity, Schnabl is exploring ways to visualize how the inward focus of this protective awareness creates a distortion in the outward reading that is too frequently misunderstood.

Katrin Schnabl is an artist, designer, and educator. Trained as a dancer, Schnabl moved from Frankfurt, Germany to New York, where she honed her skills both on stage, and off, by creating costumes for dance artists. She shifted towards fashion, and worked with renowned designers, including Jil Sander and Carolina Herrera before launching an independent fashion label Miche.Kimsa, followed by her eponymous line. Since relocating to Chicago, where she serves as the chair of the fashion department at the School of the Art Institute, Schnabl fluidly shifts between creating sophisticated garments that move sensuously on the body, and spatial installations that profoundly shift the relation with the body. Through these sensory and kinetic experiences she is forging new intersections and audiences for her project based practice.

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Tags: Chicago, Devening Projects, East Garflield Park, Everso, Jodi Hays, Jodi Hays and Katrin Schnabl: Everso, Katrin Schnabl