devening projects + editions is pleased to invite you to the September launch of three ambitious solo exhibitions. In the main gallery Sterling Lawrence opens with If I Plucked You From the Sea, an installation of new sculpture and photo-based works. In the off space, Belgian artist Alain Biltereyst presents new paintings in Notes; and Seth Hunter inaugurates Ecotone, a series of gallery interventions and editions related to his year-long residency with the gallery.

Join us at the opening reception for the artists on Sunday, September 8th from 4 – 7pm. The exhibition continues until October 12th.

In his first solo show with the gallery, Sterling Lawrence assembles a group of sculptural deliberations on the failed utility of assigned function. In works inspired by photographs found in design catalogs featuring the work of Vico Magistretti and Charles and Ray Eames, he tempers the utilitarian nature of each component and drifts into territory of a more uncertain kind. Composed as a schematic, the installation works together through interrelated displacements; meaning and use are altered through contextual shifts and formal disturbances. The constituent elements in this show are temporal and modular, but come with imbedded limitations of structure. The historical ubiquity of the sourced forms ground the work in the familiar; quickly the recognizable is upended by some unexpected maneuver. Installed off-kilter or sometimes reduced to only the facade of the original, the works are left as distorted perspectives, indicators only of the temporality of their existence. If I Plucked You From the Sea suggests that our relationship to necessary use, design and utility is utopian; the reality is something infinitely more unstable.

Sterling Lawrence lives and works in Chicago. Some of his most recent projects occurred at Tony Wight Gallery and New Capital in Chicago and Half/Dozen Gallery in Portland. He teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Carthage College in Wisconsin. www.sterlinglawrence.com

In the off space, we’re very pleased to feature new work by Belgian painter Alain Biltereyst. Notes is his first solo exhibition in the US. Biltereyst is based in Brussels; he makes work on plywood supports that refer to Geometric Abstraction and hard-edge paintings of the sixties. If these movements were about pure formalism, Biltereyst’s abstractions more often come out of quotidian urban and suburban culture. Fascinated by the vivid functionality of commercial signage — typography, logos, public advertising, commercial graphics and billboards — and the struggles of that advertising for our attention, his paintings are liberated from narrative constraint to form a purely visual and material experience. The physicality of his wood panels, the deliberate errors in the construction of form and the inaccuracies revealed throughout the process speaks to a cultural history embedded in both high art and everyday life.

Some of Alain Biltereyst’s most recent exhibitions include Ice Water Flyswatter, curated by Douglas Witmer at Tiger Strikes Asteroid in Philadelphia; Secret Kitchen Gallery in Temse, Belgium (solo show); That Being Said at Jack Hanley Gallery and the Frieze Art Fair in New York; Art Cologne; Precise Operations, curated by Alexandra Kennedy and Factor 44 and SECONDroom in Antwerp; Pages, Pages at devening projects + editions and Neue Stille, curated by Manuela Kleckx at Vous Etes Ici Gallery in Amsterdam.

We’re very excited to work with Seth Hunter on Ecotone, a new program at devening projects + editions that features artist interventions triggered by the interstitial spaces between our main gallery and the off space. To launch a year-long series of projects, Chicago artist Seth Hunter will present abundant fault at the September 8th opening. As an artist-in-residence in the gallery between July 2013 and July 2014, Hunter will work in, with and around the site to reveal links between his own conceptual interests and the physical space. abundant fault is comprised of three works and an edition designed to reveal flaws inherent in our systems of understanding. Hunter uses multiples and other repetitive processes as a vehicle for measuring a world imbued with fault. To coincide with each main-gallery exhibition during the fall and spring seasons, he will produce and present seven different editions.

Seth Hunter endeavors to explore and demonstrate a kind of blue-collar Conceptualism through ideas of observation and endurance. Hunter’s recent exhibitions include solo shows at Lawn Gallery in Chicago and Oak Room in Greeley, CO; group shows at Julius Caesar in Chicago and Family Business in New York. Hunter earned a BA from University of Northern Colorado and MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is the co-founder and director of Autumn Space in Chicago and adjunct faculty at the College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn, IL. He lives and works in Chicago. www.autumnspace.com

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Tags: Alain Biltereyst, Seth Hunter, Sterling Lawrence