For Expo Chicago 2017, we will be exhibiting works from Squeak Carnwath, James Clar, Sarah Dwyer, Carmen Neely, Lucy + Jorge Orta, and Michael Rakowitz.
Squeak Carnwath has been a leading figure in the Bay Area art world since the 1970s, and developed a signature style that incorporates meticulously applied layers of oil paint with text, repeated symbolic iconography, and abstract patterns to create complex works which gradually reveal her personal exploration of representation and memory. Featured in the booth will be a salon-style arrangement of paintings from the Pants on Fire series, which offer witty commentary on our current administration.
James Clar’s work is an analysis and observation on the effects of media and technology on our perception of culture, nationality, and identity. Throughout his body of work, Clar aims to analyze visual experience, human perception, and the elusive connections between them. Technology, for Clar, is an extension and expansion of our senses, subtly transforming our perception of the world around us until we can no longer discern natural from artificial experience.
Sarah Dwyer draws inspiration from art history and literature as well as her own personal history and childhood spent in Ireland. At Expo Chicago, we will debut three new paintings Ersila, Palanquin, and Long Sole Sound. Her works reveal traces of memory through fragments of found imagery. Dwyer’s rigorous process results in works that offer viewers a lush and nourishing experience, demanding careful viewing and re- viewing as new nuances and moments slowly reveal themselves over time. Possessing elements of both figuration and abstraction, they are a result of an intimate relationship between the act of painting, the unconscious, and intuition.
Carmen Neely is obsessed with gesture. Every stroke and splatter in her work—a combination of painting and found objects—is imbued with deep intention and awareness of her identity as a young black woman making art in the twenty-first century. “The mark”—revered and mythologized as the purest form of artistic intention by her (mostly) white, male predecessors in the art historical canon— becomes an act of subtle subversion in Neely’s paintings.
Lucy + Jorge Orta’s collaborative practice focuses on social and ecological issues, employing a diversity of media – drawing, sculpture, installation, couture, painting, silkscreen, photography, video, light and performance – to realize major bodies of work. The Orta's studios are located in central Paris and Les Moulins, a cultural complex founded by the artists along an 8km stretch of the Grand Morin valley in Seine-et-Marne. Les Moulins is an extension of their practice, to establish a collective environment dedicated to artistic research and production of contemporary art.
Based in Chicago, Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz makes work that explores recent contested social, political, and cultural histories. Commissioned for the 14th Istanbul Biennial, his project The Flesh is Yours, The Bones Are Ours develops around the legacy of an Armenian plaster craftsman named Garabet Cezayirliyan, who was responsible for creating the old moldings and friezes installed on the facades of the art nouveau edifices in Istanbul, many of which remain visible today. Rakowitz's work engages with this medium as an opening to larger questions about the transmission of knowledge and the maintenance of tradition as a resistance against cultural erasure.
