THE MISSION is pleased to announce Plane Figures, a group exhibition featuring paintings by Natalia Cacchiarelli (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Jean Alexander Frater (Chicago, IL), Cole Pierce (Chicago, IL), and Michelle Prazak (Lima, Peru).

There are many familiar abstractions: monochrome, cubist, color-field, geometric, expressionist. The early evolution of these forms was often described as a flight from the concrete image, freeing painting from Malevich’s “dead weight of the real world” into a universal, even spiritual, experience of shape and color. Conversely, the relevance of these modes to a contemporary generation of painters is often referred to in the very material language of the body and the body’s relationship to this previously forsaken space of the real world. In Plane Figures, artists working in Argentina, Peru, and Chicago are brought together by a shared interest in abstraction as a phenomenological, first-person experience of painting’s two-dimensional plane. Cacchiarelli, Frater, Pierce, and Prazak are each committed to the figure of the viewer, and the capacity of painting to renew or rearrange her perception in essential ways.

In a selection of works that engage the history of geometric abstraction and op art, the artists boldly manipulate or violate the conventions of these styles in visceral ways. Triangles, grids, cubes, and patterns appear and are deformed by imperfect geometries, rhythmic color-modulation, and gestural or accidental marks. These artists variously assert the relativity of vision and the representational, rather than non-objective, impact of planar figures.

THE SUB-MISSION is pleased to present Wilderness and Household, a collaborative project by Michael and Yhelena Hall. Merging two parts of contemporary Western culture – domestic routine and industrialization – Michael and Yhelena Hall employ concrete, consumer goods, and reinterpreted everyday home technologies in their site-specific installation. An opening reception will be held Friday, July 10, from 6 to 8pm. The show continues through Saturday, August 22.

Michael and Yhelena Hall embrace material associations in Wilderness and Household. The exhibition features a wall-mounted triptych of cast concrete collage that incorporates packaging from easily accessible consumer products and polished rebar, which is revealed in deteriorated areas of the concrete slabs. Extending their installation into the Chicago urban terrain, Michael and Yhelena Hall produce a concrete collage designed to level breaks and voids in a well-worn overpass at the corner of Ashland Avenue and Arbor Place. The concrete collage is installed directly within the infrastructure and photographs of this off-site installation are accompanied by two small, wall-mounted concrete collages cast from the same location. The final element of the installation features a box fan that propels air through a second box fan that is repurposed into a wind turbine to generate electricity to power a third, smaller oscillating fan.

Concrete works with packaging from over-consumed products paired with mundane, mass-produced objects reconstructed to generate green energy highlight the cause and effect – and ultimate discourse – of sustainable development in today’s society.

Michael Hall received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and received his BFA from State University of New York (SUNY) at New Paltz. He has recently exhibited at ROMAN SUSAN, Terrain Exhibitions, and Defibrillator Gallery in Chicago. He has also exhibited at NURTUREart Gallery in Brooklyn, Current Space in Baltimore, and the New Orleans Film Festival.

Yhelena Hall received her MFA from State University of New York (SUNY) at New Paltz and received her BFA from Kharkiv State Art School in Ukraine. She has recently completed residencies at ACRE (Artists’ Cooperative Residency and Exhibitions) and Wormfarm Institute in Wisconsin. Yhelena Hall’s work has been included in exhibitions at ROMAN SUSAN and Chicago Art Department. She exhibited at THE MISSION in PARALLELS // A Collaboration with ACRE Residency in 2013.

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Tags: Cole Pierce, Jean Alexander Frater, Michelle Prazak, Natalia Cacchiarelli