Susan Giles: Words to Grasp
Exhibition Dates: April 7 – May 11, 2024

Opening Reception: Sunday, April 7, 2024, 3:00 – 6:00 pm
Join us afterwards for a private happy hour across the street at the Quincy Street Distillery.

Gallery Hours: Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays 1:00 – 5:00 pm

Artist Talk: Saturday, April 27, 2024, 2:00 pm

The Riverside Arts Center’s Freeark Gallery is pleased to present Words to Grasp, a solo exhibition of sculpture, drawing, and video by Susan Giles, curated by Anne Harris.

“Movement never lies. It is a barometer telling the state of the soul’s weather to all who can read it.”
–Martha Graham (1991), Blood Memory

Susan Giles uses motion-capture technology to record the moving hands of speakers as they express emotion. She then gives sculptural form to these emphatic gestures. The result is monumental ephemerality — fluid stillness suspended in space and time. Built with honeycombed layers of cardboard (the most ordinary stuff), Giles’s recent site-specific sculptures swirl through large institutional spaces, unfurling and floating. They are weightless and uncanny, like ballet or baroque sculpture. The flying robes of Bernini’s twisting David come to mind.

The organic drama of this experience is at odds with its technologically sophisticated, analytical beginnings. In the end, we’re suspended between sensations: the magical marvel of tour-de-force construction, and the quiet poetry of dispassionate observation — that emotion can be recorded, measured, and translated into data, like any other natural phenomenon.

In the context of this evolving extended project, we’re excited to see how Giles responds directly to the human scale, domestic character, and intimacy of RAC’s Freeark Gallery.
–Anne Harris, Curator

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Susan Giles is an artist working in interdisciplinary media. Her work has been shown in Chicago at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Hyde Park Art Center, THE MISSION Gallery, and The Renaissance Society, as well as Mixed Greens in New York, Five Years in London, and Galeria Valle Orti in Valencia, Spain. Among her honors are a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, a Fulbright Grant, Individual Artist Project Grants from Chicago’s DCASE, and multiple Illinois Arts Council grants. Major commissions include a permanent sculpture for the University of Chicago and a public art commission with Jason Rosenthal in memory of Amy Krouse Rosenthal for the Chicago Park District.

Giles holds a MFA from Northwestern University and a MA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is Associate Professor in the Department of Contemporary Practices at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Visiting Teaching Fellow in Built Environment, Arts, Design & Architecture at University of New South Wales in Sydney.
https://www.susangiles.net

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Anne Harris’s paintings and drawings have been exhibited at venues ranging from Alexandre Gallery, DC Moore Gallery and Nielsen Gallery to the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian Institute, The Portland Museum of Art, and the California Center for Contemporary Art. Her art is in such public collections as The Fogg Museum at Harvard, The Yale University Art Gallery and The New York Public Library. Grants and awards received include a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and an NEA Individual Artists Fellowship.

Harris is an Associate Professor in the Painting and Drawing Department at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is Chair of the Exhibition Committee at the Riverside Arts Center and has curated numerous exhibitions there. She also is the originator of The Mind’s I—an expanding traveling drawing project she does with other artists, which is designed to investigate the complexities of perception and self-perception.
https://anneharrispainting.com/home.html

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Riverside Arts Center
Freeark Gallery + Sculpture Garden
32 East Quincy Street
Riverside, Illinois 60546

Gallery Hours: Thursday – Saturday, 1-5pm, Closed Sundays – Wednesdays and major holidays.
All of our exhibitions are free and open to the public.

For press inquiries and high-resolution images or for additional information contact Gallery Director, Joanne Aono at jaono@riversideartscenter.com

www.riversideartscenter.com

Official Website

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Tags: Anne Harris, Freeark Gallery, Riverside, Riverside Arts Center, Susan Giles, Susan Giles: Words to Grasp, Words to Grasp