Oli Watt
@ Trunk Show
Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S Cornell Ave, Chicago, IL 60615
Opening Sunday, January 12th, from 3PM - 5PM
On view through Saturday, February 1st
An opening at a closing: for its January exhibition, Trunk Show will release a new work by Chicago-based artist Oli Watt in conjunction with the closing of his big show, Here Comes a Regular, at the Hyde Park Art Center. Watt’s work is funny and smart: engaged with the material world of ephemera filtered through the captivating illogic of slapstick. In short, he’s a perfect match for Trunk Show’s program.
Very happily, we’re teaming with J.T. Baker Chemical Company again for this exhibition. Expect some deep dishes (profound but most likely not pizza) and cool jokes. See you beneath Watt’s PRETTY VACANT neon at HPAC! We’ll be the car.
ABOUT OLI WATT
Oli Watt has exhibited his work at venues such as the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Spencer Brownstone and Rocket Gallery. Along his vast and varied career, he’s made coloring books of automobile accidents and disasters of war, pint glasses with the sly re-styl from the Old to the Oli Style, op-interventions onto the city’s folding orange-and-white barricades, physical instantiations of cartoon props and more. Sometimes they’re material covers, sometimes comedy you can touch, but always impeccably and idiosyncratically crafted. He earned his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he has been a much-beloved teacher for a decade.
ABOUT TRUNK SHOW
TRUNK SHOW is a mobile exhibition space often located near Chicago’s Eckhart Park. Following in the rich tradition of Chicago’s apartment, alternative and creative exhibition spaces, Trunk Show is committed to challenging exhibition forms through its unique program. We feature monthly solo shows for which artists are commissioned to design a limited edition bumper sticker. The sticker lives, rides along with, and helps propel the medium beat up 1999 forest green Ford Taurus owned by Raven Falquez Munsell and Jesse Malmed. In addition to the month-long exhibitions, the editioned bumper stickers are sold (from the trunk) for a collector-friendly price. (Annual subscriptions are SOLD OUT! Stickers still available à la carte.) Openings follow a nomadic, symbiotic logic and include a public affixing, radio jams, and road snacks.
Newcity named it The Best New Gallery on a Car Bumper.
Upcoming artists include Lauren Anderson and Brandon Alvendia.
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Tags: alternative space, bumper sticker, Hyde Park Art Center, Jesse Malmed, jokes, Oli Watt, Raven Falquez Munsell, trunk show
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