Triumph is pleased to announce its second exhibition, DOOR, a four person show, featuring Anna Shteynshleyger, Jeff Prokash, Greg Bae, and Dan Devening

Reception will be held on Friday, February 24, from 5PM to 10PM
2055 W Cermak Rd, Chicago, IL 60608

DOOR is not a concept or a theme, it is a barrier or a path, depends merely on how you take it.

Partly loose, partly calculated, Dan Devening’s works operate within a bare economic circuit, in it the paintings become “scavengers” (Devening’s term). You may notice a photographic, bureaucratic remanence; an image of a wall, a lobby, a notebook, some paper shreds. Hiding, obscuring the scene, the works push your gaze to the edges or beyond the foreground. This does not reveal a thing. It is not about a story. The paint, the marks, the studio movement traces, decoy your body, through a play of balances, to an unavoidable pleasure. It’s a perverse pleasure, of slippages, in it you do not quite center on the thing, but on the forms as it shifts away from you.

One day, after weekly therapy session, Anna Shteynshleyger found herself wandering through the halls of 26 Court, a downtown Brooklyn building she had often visited. That day, following the offices doors, that are lining the walls every ten to twenty feet, she began to capture them. After about a year she had covered them all.
The findings revealed that the building is populated by legal and medical practitioners. Depending on the abbreviations next to the name, a commodification of empathy takes place on a per hour basis. A therapeutic hour depending on the vendor and subject to billing codes.
All the doors are closed.
Hours melt the clients retina at
fifteen-minute increments.
They practice, I practice, we all practice.
Business as usual.
The customer is always right.
Please pay your bill on time.

If time had stopped, the constantly morphing sky would hold still and become an opportune subject for a drawing. This vision pushed Greg Bae to produce the series The Blackhole of Love. During the hours Bae poured into the laborious and tedious drawings he meditated on this delusional desire to stop time. In 2014 Bae returned to the United States after 18 months in South Korea. His homecoming germinated a fixation on the last days in Korea. In a close circuit, his mind rebounded to the final memories in that country. One of them was him watching the 1993 movie “Groundhog Day.” The movie then became for him a metaphoric apparatus, a sense of being encased within a moving picture, the recurrence of a frozen day, yet not only. Its content is the film itself, each time you experience it, the same thing happens, time and time again.

The drawings depict the films opening sequence, a movie stuck in time. The time though is not over, The Blackhole of Love takes its title from the Korean re-, or mis-translation of the English title “Groundhog Day,” the cycle consumes itself. The drawings themselves are encased between two acrylic sheets. Preserved from damage and degradation, they are preemptively damaged, making their preservation clear.

Jeff Prakash’s’ on-going research project Objects for a Production in Eleven Acts examines the resonant nature of objects and spaces as they operate within a singular information system. With each new exhibition the set of objects, which range from FBI files obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests on German fiction writers to boxes of unused confetti collected from a shuddered nightclub in rural Wisconsin, is re-edited and restaged. Placed in arrangements that echo sites such as public storage facilities and restricted government archives, the specific arrangements provide an inside view to the sites and systems that give the project its form.
Performing the role of props, the objects enable a process of redaction, and reformulation, producing and deconstructing narratives and material constellations. In time, the objects take on new associations, building upon, or challenging the, assumptions held to them, while setting forth to the viewer a sense of responsibility. Objects for a Production in Eleven Acts works towards previously unimagined sites; storage sites; research sites; distillation sites; sites for reconfiguration of the material world.

Greg Bae lives and works in Chicago. Recent exhibitions include FL Gallery, Milan, Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago, The Chicago Urban Art Society, Chicago, and Opsis Art, Seoul. Upcoming exhibitions at The Mission Projects, Sub-Mission, Chicago and UNISEX Salon, Brooklyn. Recent residencies at Cheongju Art Studios, Cheongju, and Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul. Grants received from City of Chicago DCASE IAP, Chicago, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation.
gregorybae.com

Anna Shteynshleyger spent most of her life in and out of art institutions. After immigrating to the United States from Russia as a teenager, she did four years at MICA, two at Yale, six at SAIC and is currently in her fourth year at Pratt Institute. She has had solo exhibitions at The Renaissance Society in Chicago and Dvir Gallery in Tel Aviv. Her work is shown widely in group contexts such as The Houston MFA, The ICP, The Jewish Museum and Murray Guy Gallery among others. She is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award.
shteynshleyger.com

Dan Devening is an artist, curator and educator living in Chicago. He’s currently Adjunct Professor in the Department of Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Since the mid-1980s, his paintings and works on paper have been featured nationally and internationally. Recent projects include exhibitions in Germany at Groelle pass:projects in Wuppertal; galerie oqbo, Schau Fenster and Scotty Enterprises in Berlin; the Kunsterverein Recklinghausen; Museum Kurhaus in Kleve; dok25a in Dusseldorf and Renate Schroeder Gallery in Cologne. His curatorial projects include New Business at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago; Seers, Signs at 57W57Arts in New York; Seems at the Block Museum at Northwestern University; The Nature of Disturbance at rowlandcontemporary in Chicago; Gravity Matters and Shadowy Folds at dok25a in Dusseldorf; and Paper Products at the Evanston Art Center. In 2007, he inaugurated and currently directs devening projects + editions, a gallery project featuring exhibitions and site-specific installations by emerging and established international artists. Since inauguration, he has produced more than 80 critically recognized exhibitions. He is also a co-director of Paris London Hong Kong, an experimental exhibition space in Chicago’s West Town neighborhood that opened in 2013.
dandevening.com
deveningprojects.com
parislondonhongkong.com

Jeff Prokash is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and educator in Chicago, IL. He received his MFA in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and his BFA in Art and Art History from University of Wisconsin Madison. Jeff Prokash attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2015 and has received awards and fellowships including the Eldon Danhausen and Edward L. Ryerson Fellowships and the International Sculpture Center Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award. He is currently an adjunct lecturer in the Sculpture department at SAIC.
jeffprokash.com

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Tags: Anna Shteynshleyger, Chicago, Dan Devening, Door, Greg Bae, Jeff Prokash, Lower West Side, Triumph