Jul 16th 2010

Terence Hannum: Negative Alters

@ PEREGRINEPROGRAM

500 W Cermak Rd, 727, Chicago, IL 60616

Opening Friday, July 16th, from 6PM - 8PM

On view through Saturday, July 31st

Our dark ages. A spectral gathering of amplifiers. The ghostly smear of hair in mid-headbang. A charred chapel, blasted out windows, candles burn in some arcane rite and a bonfire menaces in the distance. What are we in? A concert gone wrong, a cult ceremony, the apocalypse?

For the past few years, Terence Hannum‘s oneiric gouache drawings have culled the periphery of heavy metal subculture and amplifier worship to analyze the nexus of music, myth and ritual. In Negative Altars the drawings are combined in triptychs, arrangements that position them akin to medieval narrative devices. In many of the pieces, the focus falls upon a shrine composed of (mostly) vintage amplifiers from an era where maximum volume was the aim, and that has only enhanced these monoliths’ collectibility and further fetishization.

Echoing the obsolescent amplifiers and speaker cabinets incorporated in the drawings, the artist has made a wall and floor installation using analog magnetic tape and a reel-to-reel tape player. Containing a loop of voices and acting as a functional frame for a drawing, this piece is the formal invocation of the unholy order the artist is conjuring with this show.

Welcome to Hannum’s blossoming cult.

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