Lauren Beck and Sophia Dixon: Wormhole
@ ACRE Projects
1913 W 17th St, Chicago, IL 60608
Opening Sunday, April 24th, from 4PM - 8PM
On view through Monday, April 25th
Lauren Beck presents new video and works on paper. The character of the Red Witch emerged from an investigation of 70s feminist theorist Mary Daly, and her project of developing an “intergalactic” language free from patriarchal surveillance and control, combined with a desire to take the syncretic (or, to put it bluntly, “New Age”) elements latent within Beck’s aesthetic vocabulary and render them absurdly manifest. Embarking on this video and performance project Beck was thinking about the following: Within the incantatory, arriving at a language that is not language; locating an unsettled hybrid between different discourses of feminism; Separatism and Utopia; Seeing the moment before composure, or Creating an ecology of conditions where the adjustments of character and performance are evident. Hex time is not linear time. The works on paper in this exhibition similarly deal with a mechanics of mysticism; they work with the allegorical spaces of the cave and the forest, and they form a metaphysical underpinning for the project as a whole.
Sophia Dixon presents new works on paper. In these drawings, Dixon was thinking about objects in transformation, and dark passages between different realities. This led her to imagery that moves between organic surface and deep space. Marks meander, lazily insisting on the integrity of the flat surface that they trace. In excess, they reach a pitch of anxiety, protesting too adamantly. Dixon grapples with how much effort humans put into constructing the pattern and texture of our everyday lives, ignoring the fragility of the world we create. An event outside of our control rips a hole in the cloth, and we fall right through. Wormholes appear in everyday life, leading straight to the uncanny. But it may be the details from our ruptured cloth, the embroidery, that we use to pull ourselves through the trapdoor, into new spaces.
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