The Hyde Park Art Center invites you to join the curator and artists from the exhibition “Hairy Blob” in celebrating their latest achievements. Curated by Adelheid Mers, Hairy Blob features work by Becky Alprin, Nadav Assor, Deborah Boardman, Lauren Carter, Ashley Hunt in collaboration with Taisha Paggett, Sarah FitzSimons, Judith Leemann, Kirsten Leenaars, Faheem Majeed and Emily Newman.

The group exhibition presents new works by artists who play with conceptions of time through video, sculpture, drawing, installation, movement, sound, and several participatory events on view at the Hyde Park Art Center from April 22 until July 29, 2012. Participating artists – Becky Alprin, Nadav Assor, Deborah Boardman, Lauren Carter, Ashley Hunt in collaboration with Taisha Paggett, Sarah FitzSimons, Judith Leemann, Kirsten Leenaars, Faheem Majeed, and Emily Newman – experiment with ideas about time, addressing uses, interpretations and ownership of natural and built environments in the present and their implications for the future.

Discourse about time represents the phenomenon largely in spatial terms: linear, long, short, compressed, sequenced. The art works in Hairy Blob take the conversation a step further, interrogating the relationship between perceptions of time and how they are necessarily grounded in spatial interactions with others and the environment. Rather than relating to time in terms of memory or nostalgia, the works included in Hairy Blob challenge cultural and social assumptions about time. At their core, the pieces in Hairy Blob hold forth the central tenets that ideational structures of time permeate the human experience.

For example, the iconic art work in Hairy Blob is Lauren Carter’s Sunsets, a three-dimensional structure comprised of gilded encyclopedias. As culturally codified perceptions of the world in concrete form, encyclopedias point to temporal effects on those perceptions when the information they contain becomes outdated. The passage of time renders both the object – the encyclopedia – and the facts therein useless. This complicated relationship is writ large in Sunsets, whose reflective surface adds another layer of complexity by mirroring the viewer’s image and revealing changes in natural light.

Many of the artists participating in the exhibition will fabricate their work publicly at the Hyde Park Art Center. The constantly evolving exhibition will include the filming of a “soap opera” by Kirstin Leenars, a free concert performed by the Association for the Advancement of Creative Music (AACM) in Majeed’s installation, and a live audio/visual performance with Nadav Assor collaborating with Israeli artist, Daniel Davidovsky.

Hairy Blob is curated by Adelheid Mers, an artist and faculty member at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). Graduate student Leah Oren is the curatorial assistant for the exhibition. Tristan Sterk will contribute exhibition design, and Jessica Westbrook and Adam Trowbridge will design and coordinate the Asteroid Belt, an online catalogue available at www.hairyblob.net beginning April 15, 2012.

Research and administrative assistance for Hairy Blob has been provided by students in the graduate curatorial seminar at SAIC. Additionally, the students will coordinate a satellite exhibition for Hairy Blob at the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection at SAIC.

For more information and the full schedule of events, please visit http://www.hydeparkart.org/exhibitions/hairy-blob.

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Tags: Adelheid Mers, Ashley Hunt, Becky Alprin, Deborah Boardman, Emily Newman, Faheem Majeed, Hyde Park, Hyde Park Art Center, Judith Leemann, Kirsten Leenaars, Nadav Assor, Sarah FitzSimons, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Taisha Paggett