Let me consider it from here
@ Renaissance Society
5811 S Ellis Ave, 4th Fl, Chicago, IL 60637
Opening Saturday, November 17th, from 5PM - 8PM
On view through Sunday, January 27th
Gritty faces look out from painted cages, surrounded by wax flowers, string, and various mutated forms. Photographs capture a studio wall marked by cryptic arrangements. A woman’s voice, floating in the space, relates her restless nighttime walks. Plush domestic rugs become the substrate for paintings of warped boots and menacing dogs.
Let me consider it from here presents four artists who operate in the liminal realms between the public and the intimate, the concrete and the fantastical. They frequently draw from their own histories, humors, and instincts as they grapple with or reimagine what’s happening in the world around them. Across a range of mediums, their works open up spaces that oscillate between strange and familiar, registering deeply personal experiences as well as more ambient cultural and political pressures.
How does an artist process the circumstances of their time in relation to their own milieu and psyche? The works in this exhibition are borne of different moments and places, whether 1970s Japan, in the case of Kudo; Europe around the early 2000s for Fletcher; and, for Hsu and DeJong, the present-day United States. Brought together here, in a period in which public life feels defined both by digital interconnection and vocal conflict on many fronts, their practices suggest other ways of meeting the world face to face: anchored in solitary places but stretching beyond, and drawing on a generative tension between inside and out.
In tandem with the gallery presentation, poets Geoffrey G. O’Brien, Simone White, and Lynn Xu have been invited to write new texts, which will be presented in a public reading and in the forthcoming catalogue. These writers evince a shared positioning with the artists in Let me consider it from here, parsing in their own ways the complexities of contemporary experience from within a more private sphere.
Curated by Solveig Øvstebø.
Let me consider it from here is supported by the David C. & Sarajean Ruttenberg Arts Foundation, the Curator’s Circle of the Renaissance Society, and the Japan Foundation, New York.
As part of the reception, Constance DeJong presents ‘Candle Night Radios Insomnia,’ a performance of nocturnal narratives. This takes place at 6pm in Swift Hall, a short walk from the gallery.
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Tags: Brook Hsu, Chicago, Constance DeJong, Hyde Park, Let me consider it from here, Renaissance Society, Saul Fletcher, Solveig Øvstebø, Tetsumi Kudo, University of Chicago
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