Kitchen Space opens its doors for its inaugural exhibition featuring the work of Sarah Colbert and Traci Fowler. The exhibition continues through Sunday April 13.

To cross your t’s and dot your i’s is to properly complete a thought, sentence or contract. You’re carrying out a transaction to the fullest extent, focusing on those finishing touches. The crossing of a t and dotting of an i are physical gestures that facilitates understanding. The work of both Traci Fowler and Sarah Colbert focuses on these details, these flourishes these finishes. In both Fowler’s and Colbert’s works there is an understanding that one minute aspect of their individual sculptural interventions activate the entire piece at hand and then point toward something else entirely.

Sarah Colbert grapples with an identity she doesn’t yet fully know yet one champions at the same time. She takes a commanding position on the fence with no intention of teetering to one side or the other: craft or high art, masculine or feminine, passive or aggressive. She is decidedly in the middle. She makes jagged edged ceramic dishes but glazes them in seafoam green. This is not ironic. This is impulse. The key is to unlock those impulses. From them it’s fair to deduce that you’re left with work laden with anxiety, obsessed with obsession and most notably poetic. She understands the rhetoric of the materials she is using, she knows the conversations she’s entering; but she is creating a new dialogue, a new slang—a high art/craft hybrid. She knows that she doesn’t always know what she is doing and lets that guide her.

Traci Fowler has her finger on the pulse of an identity, or several identities. She relies on meticulously calculated sculptural situations and blurs personal defects with social treatises. Her interests are in feelings of shame, class differentiation and the roles the women in her life have played in understanding these issues. She believes that all people can some how relate to the personal narrative items she uses and ascribe their own narrative onto them. Formal decision-making is of critical importance within Fowler’s practice. Each installation is structured around basic principles of composition. She’s interested in the ways in which her practice can generate questions and conversations around class structure, privilege and identity in various tropes but in the world at large as well.

Sarah Colbert (b. 1991) Lives and works in Chicago, IL. She is currently enrolled at Columbia College Chicago and will be receiving her BFA in May 2014. Her work has previously been exhibited at the Averill and Bernard Levinthal Gallery in Chicago.

Traci Fowler (b. 1991) Lives and works in Chicago, IL. She currently attends Columbia College Chicago and will receive her BFA in December 2014. Her work has previously been exhibited at the Averil and Bernard Levinthal Gallery, Lucid Art Lab both in Chicago. Most recently her work was featured in the US Africa Network: One Struggle Many Fronts Tour. She was a 2013 resident at 8550 Ohio, where she will return this summer.

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Tags: Kitchen Space, Logan Square, Traci Fowler, Trevor Schmutz