I was standing in my living room talking with my roommate when we found ourselves characters in an unexpected drama. He was mid-sentence, “After we talk I am going to attend to…” Then a loud boom sounded form the northwest. “…that.” We ran to the back window and saw an enormous cloud of smoke pouring off the roof of a silo we assumed was abandoned and drifting over the Stevenson Expressway. Everyone in our block was looking out their back windows shouting and pointing. My roommate joked that maybe Michael Bay was in town. We found out a few days later that that was exactly the case, and that the explosion was for the filming of Transformers 4.

For a brief moment our neighborhood was turned into fictional setting. Because the situation was so cinematically and theatrically timed (and because it actually was a movie shoot), we were simultaneously in a movie and in real life, performing our curiosity, excitement, and confusion. The thin veneer of the back wall and windows of my block’s building even resembled a stage set or a matte painting in a film – a dense, active world in low relief.

The work in this show presents subjects performing the relationship between themselves and their surroundings, and in the process challenging the distinction between the real and the imagined. Fictitious characters re-perform text from real life to create a altogether new reality. Maps create a setting out of the earth’s surface, manifesting invisible boarders with real, political consequences for the players who traverse them. The fantastical is inserted into the everyday, and the everyday finds itself in fantastical worlds.

This exhibition is part of a series; stay tuned for Scenario II in July 2016.

—

DANIELLE CAMPBELL is a media artist and curator based in Chicago, IL. She is interested in the minimally grotesque, subtle suggestions of possession, humor and repulsion and uncanny environments. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013, with a focus in cinema studies, performance and film/video. She is a previous artist-in-residence at ACRE and has exhibited her work in venues across the US including Nightingale Cinema, Echo Park Film Center, WORD Brooklyn, and Constellation. She works as the Special Events Coordinator for the Chicago Underground Film Festival, and is on the Programming Committee for Chicago Filmmakers.

FIDENCIO MARTINEZ was born in Oaxaca, Mexico, but was raised in North Carolina after his family migrated. His current work examines immigration, the drug war, and socio-economic issues affecting Mexico. In his work, Martinez manipulates paper, surfaces and maps to refer to the crafts and customs taught to him as a toddler in Oaxaca – ones used to celebrate festivals and mourn the dead. For Martinez these techniques are a way to reconnect with a time and place no longer present. Martinez received a BFA from Memphis College of Art in 2013 and an MA & MFA from the University of Iowa in 2015. Recent group exhibitions include Smithsonian’s Art Intersections: Asian-Latino Pop-Up Gallery, MD; Fresh Prints: The Nineties to Now at the Cleveland Museum of Art, OH; DUMA Biennial at the Dubuque Museum of Art, IA; Somewheres & Nowheres: New Prints 2014 at the International Print Center New York, NY. Recent solo exhibitions were held in Iowa, North Carolina, Tennessee, Missouri and Maryland.

DAIN MERGENTHALER was raised in Baltimore, Maryland where he earned his BFA in the fiber program at Maryland Institute College of Art in 2011. He is now in Detroit, Michigan, in candidacy for his MFA in fiber at Cranbrook Academy of Art, expecting to complete the program this year. Dain has traveled around the country for residencies and exhibitions that have afforded him countless opportunities to indulge his stubborn commitment to extremely slow work, and has taken part in programs at Vermont Studio Center, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Penland School of Crafts, and ACRE, to name a few. Most recently, he has exhibited work at Hatch Art Gallery and the Heidelberg Project in Detroit, and Lillstreet Art Space in Chicago.

GONZALO REYES RODRIGUEZ (b. 1987) is a visual artist working with photographic, video, and live art. Exhibition highlights include Casa America – Madrid, Vox Populi – Philadelphia, Babel Visningsrom for Kunst – Trondheim, Hyde Park Art Center – Chicago, and a solo exhibition at The Windor Contemporáneo – Madrid. He has studied at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and has a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is an MFA candidate at the University of Pennsylvania and participated in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia Program for Advanced Studies in Critical Practices, 2015.

DANNY FLOYD is an artist, researcher, and educator based out of Chicago. He holds a BFA in Photography from Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), an MA in Visual and Critical Studies, and an MFA in Sculpture both from School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). His studio and research work deals with the social aspects of sensory phenomena such as music, language, architecture, and weather. He currently teaches in the Visual and Critical Studies and Sculpture departments at SAIC. He is a regular contributor to Serpentine Magazine and the co-director of Ballroom Projects, an artist-run gallery on Chicago’s south side. Before moving to Chicago, Danny worked and taught at a nonprofit art center in Providence, RI called AS220, where he returned as a visiting artist-in-residence in summer of 2012.

ACRE (Artists’ Cooperative Residency and Exhibition) was founded in 2010 with the ambition to provide the arts community with an affordable, cooperative, and dialogue-oriented residency program. The residency itself takes place each summer in rural southwest Wisconsin and brings together artists from across disciplines and levels of experience to create a regenerative community of cultural producers. Over the course of the following year ACRE endeavors to further support its residents by providing venues for exhibitions, idea exchange, interdisciplinary collaboration, and experimental projects.

More information about ACRE can be found at www.acreresidency.org

Official Website

More events on this date

Tags: ACRE Projects, Dain Mergenthaler, Danielle Campbell, Danny FLOYD, Fidencio Martinez, Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez