A collaboration between the curatorial collective Potluck Salon and artist Falak Vasa, “Place Interminable” explores the continuity between the home, the studio, the gallery and the city. The project will feature two parts—a one-week online residency and a concurrent storefront display—intended to be both a complete exhibition and a work-in-progress. This approach expresses Potluck Salon’s commitment to staging processes that go unnoticed or are deliberately left by the wayside. Throughout the duration of “Place Interminable”, Vasa will broadcast live video feed documenting his life as the lived practice of an artist, conflating routine acts and acts of artistic labor to one of the storefront windows in Logan Square. In the second window, Vasa will project live video of the pedestrians, making them confront their own banal routines in the context of art-viewing. Arthur Schopenhauer has described the aesthetic experience of art as a rare moment of the triumph of the intellect over ‘world will’, the force that drives all life to survive. Through the live images, “Place Interminable” asks: are we being presented with an experience of transcendence or of struggle? The format of the project acknowledges the struggles of viewing itself. Immersing the potential audience in a terrain of ceaseless ambiguous banality, “Place Interminable” underscores our propensity towards varying modes of engagement, from the quick glance of a pedestrian to the inexplicable attachment of a returning visitor. As the video feed will roll on, the intentionality of the spectator and the artist will blur into each other, offering endless possibility for creation.

The event is part of 2nd Floor Rear 2016.

*Timings for screenings between Feb 3-9 will be updated*

Falak Vasa is an interdisciplinary artist from Kolkata, India, currently residing in Chicago and studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (BFA 2018). His work intertwines different media such as performance, film/video, installation, photography and technology to create experiences for audiences that are often temporal and resemble an otherworldly space. Vasa explores notions of ‘nature’ and questions its very existence. He attempts to complicate mainstream, accepted ideas of environmentalism, conservation and the distinctions between society and nature by creating work that often exists at the periphery of what is considered ethical and acceptable. He is also actively engaged in poetic and philosophical explorations of plant perception and non-human perspectives in ways that allow for new, unconventional modes of perceiving the world. His exhibitions over the last year include “Telegraphic Fields (First Transmission)”, a group show at the Leroy Neiman Center, and a performance as part of the show “At The Headwaters” at the Marshall J. Gardner Center for the Arts (Gary, IN). He participated in the “New Blood IX” performance festival.

Potluck Salon (Lara Schoorl + Zeenat Nagree) is a collective engaged with spoken word and live action. They are committed to staging processes that go unnoticed or are deliberately left by the wayside, such as the note-taking of studio artists, performances disclosed from an audience, or objects whose status as art remains tenuous. This curatorial framework arises from a larger interest in parts of cities that seem to be invisible. Potluck Salon is envisioned as a year-long collaboration between Schoorl and Nagree, while both are resident in Chicago. Their last major collaboration, “unruly attachments: considering failure”, looked at artists’ attachment to their self-proclaimed failed endeavors.

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Tags: 2ndfloorrear, logansquare