SOFT GROUND
new works by EMILY CLAYTON + EILEEN MUELLER
JANUARY 12-16, 2012

Opening Reception: Friday Jan 13th, 6-9pm
Open Hours: Thursday Jan 12th 4-7pm, Saturday Jan 14th 12-6pm

Roots & Culture
1034 N Milwaukee, Chicago 60622

SOFT GROUND
Emily Clayton’s recent work began as a series informed by sunsets, occult photography and stage curtains. Charged with spacial impossibilities, each are asking the viewer for the same thing, to willfully suspend disbelief. Distilling from this a sense of illusion and visual deception, the works are reduced to an atmospheric gradient of color. The series examines the two dimensional plane of an artificial horizon in relation to the stage and studio photography. They are backdrops, scenery, simulated landscapes all void of subject or performer. Situated within the historical tenet of process driven practices the work aims to exhibit a calculated control of material and form.

Eileen Mueller’s work focuses on the material history of the photographic image and its role in confounding unwritten or inaccessible histories. Her latest work links her own practice within communal educational spaces and the historic progeny of the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College. While making a pilgrimage to Black Mountain, Mueller sought out the vistas wherein the landscape served as an emulsion, fixing the ghosts of American Modernism. Through embedding her own images into an anomic archive that also contains material mined from historic materials she poeticizes existing histories to build a mythology of the artist.

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EMILY CLAYTON is a Nashville based artist who works primarily in sculpture, installation and painting. After receiving her BFA from University of Tennessee in 2004 she spent several years in Chicago helping to organize exhibitions and events with the Co-Prosperity Sphere, Version Festival and Mule Magazine. Her work has been shown in Chicago, New York and Nashville.

More information about Emily Clayton can be found at www.emilyclayton.com

EILEEN MUELLER has studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she recently received her BFA. She is the recipient of the Fred Endsley Memorial Fellowship and the World Less Travelled Grant as well as a finalist for the Gelman Travel Fellowship. Eileen recently showed in Ceaseless Blooms in Jobless Colors at Johalla Projects and is scheduled to show at the Kohler Museum this coming fall. Eileen is the co-founder of GURL DON’T BE DUMB, a curatorial project that is currently based out of Chicago.

More information about Eileen Mueller can by found at www.eileenmueller.com

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Tags: ACRE, Eileen Mueller, Emily Clayton, Roots & Culture