Jan 14th 2012

I’M HERE TO MAKE FRIENDS: an exhibit of new works ‘by’ Aay Preston-Myint

@ Happy Collaborationists Exhibition Space

1254 N Noble St., Chicago, IL 60642

Opening Saturday, January 14th, from 6PM - 10PM

On view through Saturday, January 28th

I’M HERE TO MAKE FRIENDS
an exhibit of new works ‘by’ Aay Preston-Myint
featuring collaborations with and performances by Mark Aguhar, Claire Arctander, R.E.H. Gordon, Dan Luedtke, Rebecca Mir, Alexander Valentine, Viktor Van Bramer, Charles Vinz, Xina Xurner and Latham Zearfoss

Opening Reception: Saturday Jan. 14, 6-10pm
Closing Performances and Lectures: Saturday Jan. 28, 6-10pm

In “I’m Here To Make Friends,” part of Happy Collaborationists’ ‘Nostalgia’ series, Aay Preston-Myint digs through eight years of friendships, roommates, lovers, spaces, and collectives to assemble a body of work for a “solo” show using collaboration as its foundation. This body of work explores the conceptual and ideological push-and-pull between ephemeral social practices and material-based, individual artistic practices, and then uses it as fodder for the artistic output itself. As the basis for working together, the artists navigate through the supposedly neutral territory of non-art objects commonly found in the apartment gallery (itself a site of nostalgia) – such as projection screens, pedestals, linens, furniture, and house plants. Infrastructures of domesticity, display, and performance are imagined as the ends, and not just the means, of aesthetic production. A consciously reductive, oblique approach reveals a tenuous grasp on shared experiences and identities, while at the same time providing new platforms (literal and figurative) on which acts of consumption, looking, posing/posturing, projection and reflection take place. More casually, the show could be described as a glorious failed attempt at visionary interior design and party planning.

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