Concertina Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Party Crashers, a group exhibition featuring photography, performance, drawing, and mixed media by Dick Blau, Micah Lexier, Dutes Miller & Stan Shellabarger, Davida Nemeroff, Annie Pootoogook and Carrie Schneider.

When representing friends and family, the role of the artist is fraught with complications. Intimacy becomes public, and both artist and viewer are implicated in voyeuristic play. The presence of this exhibition in our domestic space intensifies the roles of outsider and insider, as once the audience crosses the threshold into our home, an acute sense of self-consciousness may arise as concepts of the private and public are confused.

In photographs by Dick Blau, representations of his children and long-term partner reveal the slippery relationship between candid and staged photography. At once a father documenting his family and an artist constructing a composition, Blau calls attention to the awkwardness and inhibitions that exist in the most intimate of relationships. Annie Pootoogook’s colorful drawings in pencil crayon similarly depict everyday family life. The daughter of a long line of Inuit artists, Pootoogook gives viewers a sense of contemporary life in Cape Dorset, Canada, drawing attention to and at times bridging gaps between interior and exterior, insider and outsider.

Carrie Schneider’s Derelict Self series humorously portrays the artist shadowing her older brother in a variety of staged poses. As her body awkwardly mirrors his, issues of sibling respect and rivalry are exposed in the relationship. Mirroring also occurs in the silhouettes of Dutes Miller and Stan Shellabarger. Beards entwined, the artists offer a self-contained representation of intimacy in both their physical resemblance and their roles as both subject and object.

Davida Nemeroff and Micah Lexier both use technical and stylistic manipulations to represent their fathers. In his Fax Test series Micah Lexier letterpresses faxed notes from his father, mimicking his personal script, and drawing attention to modes of familial communication and technological mediation. In What Window Light Can do For My Dad, Nemeroff exhibits not only a family vacation narrative, but she also explores the mechanisms of display. As natural light hitting a photo of her father is re-photographed, his portrait is framed and doubly mediated.

These works depict family and friends in a variety of mediums and contexts, complicated by the apartment gallery context. Entering a domestic space that is made public can be an unnerving experience, but for this exhibition, “party crashers” are welcome.

Official Website

More events on this date

Tags: Concertina Gallery, Logan Square