LESSEN
@ BEN RUSSELL
1716 S Morgan St, 2F, Chicago, IL 60608
Opening Saturday, December 12th, from 6PM - 9PM
On view through Saturday, January 9th
This one goes out to all you bloated-stomach Thanksgiving celebrants, you 4am Best Buy Black Friday tent-pitchers, you Damien Hirst diamond skull collectors, you non-recyclers and you Gucci Mane enthusiasts. These are foodstamp and slim wallet times after all, and by now it should be clear that the best way forward is on your tiptoes, preferably in some nice soft leather moccasins. Your friends at BEN RUSSELL are here to help you focus your art consumption by 2/3rds, to find a use for all your apple picking surplus and, if you do end up throwing anything away, to make sure that it ends up in that compost pile out back. With our help, you’ll realize that gaudy neon flourishes are so 2008, that neo-minimalism persists only because Minimalism was abandoned far too soon, and that even “less is more” can be LESSENed to much less.
It’s been a tough month or two at BEN RUSSELL, but now that our BEER hangover is finally over, we can clearly see that BEN RUSSELL : LESSEN is in fact a lesson of the most useful kind, in five parts:
1) ABATE: From a Paiute American Indian reservation in California, ecologist/urban forager/gardener Nance Klehm gives us a virtual lesson on how to reduce and reuse our trace in the material world.
2) DECAY: Casey Lurie presents Apple Structure 2, the second iteration in a series of outdoor structures designed to be built using only quarter-inch dowel rods and apples as joints.
3) DIMINISH: In which the cash money ice glitz bling of hip-hop and R&B’s greatest is subjected to the minimalist compositional tendencies of Joe Grimm‘s sonic minimalism/process art installation.
4) MINIMIZE: Complicating the transcendent ambition of high modernism’s abstract expressionism, Ben Foch employs a common house painting roller to create a large scale gestural painting with an economy of means.
5) REDUCE: Michael Snow‘s 1967 seminal structuralist 16mm film Wavelength, comprising of a 44:00 zoom across a NYC loft, is screened in its 2003 15:00 video iteration as WVLNT (Wavelength For Those Who Don’t Have the Time).
Please join us for the glorious-yet-humble 5th installment at BEN RUSSELL as we prepare for that long cold Chicago winter by clearing our collective bodies/minds of distractions and focusing on LESS(EN). Nothing, after all, is permanent; everything will LESSEN if we give it enough time…
« previous event
next event »