Join us for an artist panel discussion between solo artist Jacqueline Surdell and survey artists Jeff Carter and Amy Vogel, moderated by Pia Singh.

This panel discussion will explore common themes found throughout both Surdell’s solo exhibition The Conversion: Rings, Rupture, and the Forest Archive and the invitational group exhibition Natura Non Constristatur. Pia Singh will lead a discussion investigating the fraught relationship between nature and humanity, philosophical constructs of time as it pertains to the artists’ practice, and the role of the sublime in a contemporary society.

The artist talk will conclude by 4pm with a reception to follow.

Jacqueline Surdell employs the full force of her body to weave sculptural topographies that investigate material, space, and time. Her woven reliefs—composed of twisted, bound, and tightly or loosely wefted ropes—pay homage to painterly traditions in landscape painting.

The Conversion merges the importance of the forest in Surdell’s familial legacy and her sustained interest in the historical practice of landscape painting. For Surdell, the forest is a site for physical and spiritual transformation, and holds the tension between remembrance and regrowth.Jacqueline Surdell’s combination of autobiographical exhumation, art historical investigation, and spiritual self-reckoning are literally and figuratively woven together in her work.

Restructuring parts of Ikea furniture and everyday consumer objects into sculptures which reimagine 20th century buildings, ideas, and the Bauhaus school ethos, Jeff Carter revisits the Modernist value of “form follows function” with a novel approach to “form over function” to imitate and advance the ideas of these historical designs.

Jeff Carter’s Tree Test 2 is modeled after a low-resolution topographical scan of the last remaining complex in Chicago with design collaboration by Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius. The sculpture rotates one singular time within a year, similarly to how tree rings tell the age of a tree when cut down. This mechanical intervention into the space, with motion almost imperceptible to the visitor, offers a critical evaluation of Natura Non Constristatur in the current climate crisis.

In forming, deforming, reforming, Amy Vogel’s conceptual artwork often mimics landscape—at the hands of cultural conceptions of nature. The drawings, paintings, sculptures, and installations, dislocated from context and landscape, recalibrate the human perception of nature as beautiful or ugly, durable or frail, temporal or atemporal.

Amy Vogel has taken erasure unto her drawings of idyllic landscapes, with curious figures frolicking, oblivious, in clearings surrounded by towering trees. With her almost contradictory interventions, Vogelrecalibrates the human perception of nature as a duality of beautiful and strange, durable and frail, temporal and atemporal.

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Tags: Amy Vogel, and Pia Singh, Artist Panel Discussion with Jacqueline Surdell, Artist Talk:, Chicago, Jacqueline Surdell, Jeff Carter, Pia Singh, Secrist | Beach, Walter Gropius, West Town