Opening Reception: Wednesday, March 1 | 4:00PM

Plop. Splurt. Sigh. Corporeal sounds infrequently associated with fine art but pervasive in moments of life that artists—who happen to unavoidably inhabit bodies—navigate every day. The three artists in Bearing: object, body, and space present a variety of experiments with the perceived distance between artists’ bodies and the work they produce. Pushing against the social and aesthetic boundaries that police both art and gender, Amato, Hutchens and Murphy deploy an arsenal of photography, video, installation, performance and sculpture to break circuits of thinking, seeing and making that might eschew lived experience of the physical present in favor of some antiseptic isolated artspace.

Multiple somatic dimensions in Amato’s practice implicate viewers as witnesses to both acts of looking in her appropriated amatuer porn piece Green Room and to the intimate experience of being held and weighing down in Untitled Dough Project (Body Time-Lapse). Yeasty fermentation within a minimalist white tube creates a kinetic contrast to the stark stillness of the a white gallery wall. A sense of expansion and the evidence of being kneaded and needing intimacy in Amato’s performative sculpture and video instills the space with a sense of vulnerability that serves as a reminder that the gallery might be a place of growth.
Murphy’s exhibited works grow from the intersection of the body and science. Juxtaposing celestial spaces and forms with elemental aspects of our being, Murphy prods at the false notion that any frontier or exploration might be detached from human qualities. Bodies resist being graphed and contained. Squirts and bulges escape from metallic forms to refute an anaesthetized composition that might render them other-wordly. Using absurdity and contrast Murphy work stands moored to the terrestrial.

Acts of contrast are also the crux of Hutchens’ work, with the push and pull of family through the manipulation of bodily evidence. In my mask mom’s mirror a youthful interior mask struggles for space against an aged exterior, manifesting a tension between each frame and in the distance between Hutchens and her mother. More than a record of her efforts to recreate a photograph of her mother, (m)other manifests an archive of the artist’s temperament and environment, of a particular relationship to both representation and artmaking. Her interest in the archive extends to the series Heirless, an ongoing multi-part archive of the the afterlife of childhood, mapping a network forged by objects and their meanings. When viewed together, these artworks respond to the call of feminist and conceptual artists who have for decades worked to extend and explode the social boundaries of media and fine art. Together these Amato, Hutchens and Murphy attend to the vital significance of messy material realities of daily life through art practice.

Natalie Zelt, PhD Candidate in American Studies, University of Texas at Austin

Image: Santina Amato (MFA 2017), Lindsay (MFA 2017/MAVCS 2018), and Michelle Marie Murphy (MFA 2017), Bearing: object, body and space, 2017.

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Tags: Bearing Object Body and Space, Chicago, Lindsay Hutchens, Loop, Michelle Marie Murphy, Santina Amato, School of the Art Institute of Chicago Student Union Gallery