Paul Nudd, Casey Ann Wasniewski: Dirty
@ Hyde Park Art Center
5020 S Cornell Ave, Chicago, IL 60615
Opening Sunday, May 11th, from 3PM - 5PM
On view through Friday, July 4th
Dirty was a two-person exhibition of new works by Paul Nudd and Casey Ann Wasniewski that examined the uncanny similarities between geology and biology through paintings and sculptures. Animal, vegetable, or mineral? There is no separation of categories visible in the respective works of these two artists. Mining the murky ambiguous matter where all three elements meet provides fertile ground to cultivate imagery that could be subterranean as equally as it could exist within the human cavity.
Paul Nudd pushed his signature biomorphic shapes and encrusted textures into an expanded graphic (sub)landscape with a new series of five cavernous 6 x 8 foot grayscale paintings. Previous work by Nudd include colorful drawings often depicting comic book representations of bugs or video works that concentrate on bubbling paint that simultaneously reminding one of the body’s interior and the mouth of a natural spring gurgling up from the earth. The five canvases that debuted in Dirty incorporate grotesque items–synthetic hair and little balls of clay that resemble dried mucus–that drive the art historical read of the body-as-landscape further into a molecular level where all elements appear the same at the core.
Equally tactile, the amorphous soft sculptures by Casey Ann Wasniewski contain sprigs of horse hair in odd places and patches of dark fur infusing these objects with a life of their own, perhaps extraterrestrial. Wasniewski knits wool yarn using the French knot, then sews the yarn onto industrial felt to make the substantial crater-like shapes. Intentionally mounted on sterile steel rods, the sculptures incorporate the aesthetic of a natural science museum display raising questions regarding the inspirational origin of this type of artifact.
About Paul Nudd and Casey Wasniewski:
Both Paul Nudd and Casey Ann Wasniewski are artists working in the Chicagoland area. Nudd received an MFA from University of Illinois at Chicago and a BFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He exhibits regularly at Western Exhibitions and has been included in solo and group shows throughout the Midwest since 2001. Wasniewski received an MFA (2005) and a BFA (2003) from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been exhibited at the Lancaster Art Museum (PA), Atlantic Center for the Arts (FL), and she was one of the selected artists to participate in The Artist Project at Art Chicago 2008.
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Tags: Casey Ann Wasniewski, Chicago, dirty, Hyde Park, Hyde Park Art Center, Paul Nudd
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