New works by Brett Ian Balogh, Didier Morelli, Ruby Thorkelson, and Stephanie Williams // Curated by Matthew A. Coleman
ACRE Projects | October 7 –29, 2016
1345 W 19th Street
Chicago, IL 60608
The work on view in A Polite Distance is anything but polite. Social distance, or the perception of difference between members of various groups, is reinforced by politeness and other coded behaviors. “Polite distance” is seeing and not doing; a method of editing one’s response; a consideration of space; a way to call out inequalities, but only for the optics on social media. Brett Ian Balogh, Didier Morelli, Ruby Thorkelson, and Stephanie Williams address the pitfalls of polite distance through a range of strategies. From critiques of cultural colonization and the sociopolitical inequity created by gentrification and political vanity to meditations on Earth’s invisible forces, like gravity and electromagnetism, these artists share a particular consideration for the power and politics of space.
About the Artists
Brett Ian Balogh is a Chicago-based artist making sculptural, aural, and cartographic explorations of the electromagnetic landscape. At a time when we increasingly rely on wireless technologies, Brett draws attention to the personal, private, and political aspects of our wireless world. He is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he teaches courses in digital fabrication, robotics, physics, sound, and electronics. Brett is a free103point9 transmission artist and has exhibited and performed at P.S.1 (NY), Diapason (NY), Devotion Gallery (NY), The MCA (Chicago), and The Hyde Park Arts Center (Chicago), among others.
Born and raised in Montreal, Didier Morelli is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in Performance Studies at Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois. As an interdisciplinary artist, Morelli combines practice and research in both his academic and performative explorations. His live art practice includes endurance-based durational actions and contextually specific relational interactions. His studio-based work, which includes drawing, collage, photography and video, has been shown in solo exhibitions, notably at the Katherine Mulherin Gallery (Toronto, 2012) Defibrillator Performance Art Gallery (Chicago, 2015) and at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery at Concordia University (Montreal, 2016). He has performed at Nuit Blanche (Montreal, 2013); Scotiabank Nuit Blanche (Toronto, 2012); the Performance Arcade (Wellington, New Zealand, 2014); at 7a*11D International Festival of Performance Art (Toronto, 2014); and at the Mary & Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University (Chicago, 2016). He has been an artist in residence in Canada, the United States of America, and Iceland. His academic research investigates the relationship between the body of the artist and the infrastructure of the city in Los Angeles and New York City between 1970 and 1985, with specific attention to how performance art resists, renegotiates, and responds to architectural functionalism.
Ruby Thorkelson graduated in 2016 with an MFA from SAIC, and has shown work at Chicago venues including EXPO, Roman Susan, Chicago Filmmakers, Chicago Alternative Comics Expo, Woman Made Gallery, and Plaines Project. She has forthcoming group exhibitions at ACRE Projects and Hyde Park Art Center, and was awarded a 2016 residency at Ox-Bow in Michigan and a 2015 residency at ACRE in Wisconsin. In 2015 she was part of the 6-person collective that produced Build Presence: A Movement Supportive Happening for Racial Justice at the Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago Home Theater Festival, and Woman Made Gallery. She plays music in Chicago band Lezurrexion, and teaches in the Liberal Arts Department at SAIC.
Stephanie Williams received her MFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design. She has shown nationally and abroad including ACRE Projects, Civilian Art Projects, Washington Project for the Arts, Grizzly Grizzly, School 33 and Lawrence University’s Wriston Art Center with reviews in the Huffington Post, the Washington Post. She has received fellowships from both the Vermont Studio Center (VCCA) and Toby Devan Lewis Foundation. Recent projects include costuming for the DC Art Center’s production of Antonin Artaud’s play To Be Done with the Judgment of God and The Anatomy of Fairy Tales at the Everhart Museum. This summer she was a resident fellow at the VCCA. Williams is an Assistant Professor of Art at James Madison University and is currently based out of Washington, DC.
don't want your future
Nadav Assor, C. Matthew Luther, Joshua Rains, Yaloo
ACRE PROJECTS | June 3 – 25, 2016
ACRE Projects presents don’t want your future, an exhibition that scrutinizes the destructive forces behind digital and industrial technologies on the global ecology. Video, sculpture, animation, and drawings question the ways that our technologically-mediated moment has an effect on social and geopolitical relations, agency, and the precarious state of our environment. From footage of the Global Desert Line in Israel and polluted landscapes in the United States and China, to the confessional space of social media made public and a re-animated tractor, 2015 ACRE Residents Nadav Assor, C. Matthew Luther, Joshua Rains, and Yaloo critique our ongoing reliance upon these technologies and infrastructures as our planet’s climate crisis escalates.
The exhibition’s title is a line from Anohni’s 2016 album HOPELESSNESS. In “Why Did You Separate Me from the Earth?” Anohni laments the ways that human forces, whether they are global neoliberalist economic behaviors or geopolitical conflict, have divided human from the notion that they coexist with the planet. Anohni sings:
The rotten bodies threaded gold
The pitch of hair and sticky meat
The sea life cut with plastic
A white cross gilded gold
A case of white doves
Laying in the boiling snow
A sharp knife of concrete
The blue line of tuna’s throat
I don’t want your future
I’m never coming home
I don’t want your future
I’ll be born before you’re bornWhy did you separate me from the earth?
Why did you separate me from the earth?
What did you have to gain?
Anohni has been thinking about the body’s connections to our planet for some time. On a track in her previous album, Cut the World, Anohni, then performing as Antony and the Johnsons, explains that she can’t help but feel that she is “made of this place” and that because of the withering health of the planet that she is afraid that she will not be reborn, a notion that she extends further into protest on the eleven tracks on HOPELESSNESS. I found particular resonance with Anohni’s album and what the artists present in this exhibition. It is not that the artists are directly addressing the death of an ecology that could sustain human life; rather, they present present and future landscapes and ecologies.
In “Ground Effect: mapping the conflict shoreline,” Nadav Assor weaves together different aerial perspectives of the desert between Gaza and the West Bank. He walks the border of the desert following an isohyet, a meteorological term that signifies locations that have received the same amount of rainfall in any given period, where there is less than 200 millimeters of rain a year. This line also signifies the edge of global, local, and ecological conflicts in the region. Assor’s action of filming and traversing the terrain performs the ways in which mapping and and drone surveillance have physical and political effects on landscape. In segments, Assor composes beautiful, pulsating geologic core samples of this region from a vertical perspective that also seeks to find the literal core of its ecology and the infrastructure of conflict: flowers, cabbage, grasses, dirt and rocks, chirping birds, barbed wire, wells, monuments, graves, aquifers, overhead jets, and machine drones. The title “Ground Effect” alludes to the turbulence and feedback created when aerial vehicles hover close to the ground and also the ways in which, as media studies scholar Lisa Parks writes, drones “shape where people move and how they communicate, which buildings stand and which are destroyed, who shall live and who shall die.”[1] “Ground Effect” was commissioned as part of “Agropolis: Artistic Interventions in a Scientific Exhibition,” curated by Maayan Sheleff. It opens at the Bloomfield Science Museum, Jerusalem, in June 24th, 2016. Additional support was provided by the Connecticut College Ender's and Lynch Faculty Research Funds.
Those in the sciences and humanities alike propose that if a future society starts digging centuries after our civilization is finished, they will find geologic layers of technologic waste.[2] Monitors, keyboards, shattered iPhones, broken ear buds, silicone, tungsten, battery acid, Samsung Galaxies, Ethernet cables, webcams, hard drives, bulldozers, shovels, steel beams, cranes, screws and bolts. What may be evident by future archaeologists is that we place our technology on a conspicuous and precariouis pedestal. Yaloo’s “Yaloofarm for ACRE” is a site-responsive animation of an invasion by an alien race of creatures made of corn. They use our John Deere tractors to sow the seeds and propagate the rest of their invasion. Her video sculpture critiques and parodies our idolatry towards the tools and technology of production, rather than the agricultural product – a shift from a now-ancient worship of life and regeneration to that of the tool. While some blame farming for the beginning of our climate crisis,[3] the reality is that farming is one of the most important technological developments that ensured a future for humans. This is evident in ancient Mayan and Aztec figurines of anthropomorphized representations of maize. These artifacts inspired Yaloo in her creation for “Yaloofarm”, an ongoing series of work.
Responding to the environmental effects of world super powers’ geopolitical economic agendas, C. Matthew Luther’s “PM: 2.5” and “The Long March” are both mementos of his time teaching and living in China and also indictments of global trade agendas that take the Earth’s ecologies for granted. In “PM: 2.5,” shots of hazy Wuhan, China skies and still-polluted US Superfund Sites, locations that are so polluted that the EPA has initiated long-term restoration projects, contrast those of the Grand Canyon and Washington Island, Wisconsin as reminders of, on the one hand, the conditions we create that may pollute our idea of “natural” “purity,” both revealed to be ideological constructs. “The Long March” focuses on the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest hydroelectric dam that is nearly a mile and a half long. Luther’s work amplifies and expands cries for accountability from global powers whose economic bottom line is more important than the health of the planet.
Joshua Rains’ series of durational drawings, “If You Need Me”, calls into question the ways in which personal information is shared via digital platforms. His pen and ink drawings and zine of the series were inspired by a moment when a former neighbor developed an exclusively online relationship with him over gay mobile social media apps. The neighbor sent Rains photos of the outside of his apartment one night, and over a series of months Rains began to react to the invasive act by re-presenting images and text from the neighbor’s Facebook and Instagram feeds in an effort to understand his behavior. The series concluded when the former-neighbor appeared to lose interest in Rains. “If You Need Me” is a provocative work that raises complex questions about the morality sharing of private, confessional moments on a public space.
The show came together by the chance that the four of these artists attended the ACRE residency in 2015 in Wisconsin. I’m thrilled that they were up for the challenge to present an exhibition that predominantly features video in the ACRE Project space.
– Matthew Coleman
[1] It is worth quoting Parks further: “As a drone flies through the sky, it alters the chemical composition of the air. As it hovers above the earth, it can change movements on the ground. As it projects announcements through loudspeakers, it can affect thought and behavior. And as it shoots hellfire missiles, it can turn homes into holes and the living into the dead. Irreducible to the screen’s visual display, the drone’s mediating work happens extensively and dynamically through the vertical field — through a vast expanse that extends from the earth’s surface, including the geological layers below and built environments above, through the domains of the spectrum and the air to the outer limits of orbit. The point here is that drones do not simply float above the surface of the earth — they rewrite and reform life on earth in a most material way. Drone operations shape where people move and how they communicate, which buildings stand and which are destroyed, who shall live and who shall die. e drone is as much a technology of inscription as it is a technology of sensing or representation.” Lisa Parks, “Drones, Vertical Mediation, and the Targeted Class,” Feminist Studies 42, no. 1 (2016): 232.
[2] C.f. Jussi Parikka A Geology of Media, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (2015).
[3] Timothy Morton, a philosopher and devout Object Oriented Ontologist, somewhat obviously and narrowly lays the cause of global warming on agriculture; yet the irony of this accusation is that without agriculture, human life would not have advanced to such a point to even think about Object Oriented Ontology.
A collaboration with Brian T. Leahy
Part of 2nd Floor Rear, Chicago, February 2015
Hosted by Above the Picture Framing Shop
Based on the shared media dreams of Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable and Home & Garden’s timeless television programming, Exploding Home and Garden Inevitable was an ecstatic real estate experience.
Through an immersive virtual installation and an unreliable crowd of festival-attendees, apartment hunters, actors and participants, Exploding Home and Garden Inevitable put the viewer in the middle of a live HGTV experience, fulfilling dreams and dashing hopes along the way.
Photos by Ji Yang
An exhibition by Elena Ailes, Lucas Briffa, Matt Coleman, and Alison Reilly.
WEST, featuring Elena Ailes (MFA 2015), Lucas Briffa (MFA 2015), Matthew Coleman (MA 2015), and Alison Reilly (MA 2015), deconstructs romantic stereotypes about the American West while questioning how humans mythologize the land. This interdepartmental collective will explore the conflation of memory, dislocation, and myth, and investigate the power of ideology, secrecy, and mediation within the West’s perceived emptiness.
Because of its expansive nature and seemingly endless possibilities, land artists of the 1960s like Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, and Michael Heizer used the West as a spiritual and intellectual tabula rasa. To what extent is this fetishization of the West primitivist? And further, what motivates a continued attraction to remoteness? By investigating their own insecurities, prejudices, and curiosities about the place they call home, these artists and art historians will challenge current dialogues.
Elena Ailes’ sculpture and Lucas Briffa’s photographs realign connections between memory and myth. Their respective landscapes suggest that there is much more to the West than a remoteness wherein one can find spiritual enlightenment, but rather a highly self-reflective stitching together of memories attached to the land. One may look at their work and see traditional depictions of western landscape, but what emerges are intensely personal re-contextualizations of home. They transform sites into non-sites and construct fiction out of memoir to create a West that belongs to them.
Government surveillance server farms, nuclear production complexes, and expansive mining sites are constructed in deserts and remote areas, and yet in the void of those spaces lay the data, identities, memories, and myths of society. Through art historical research and site visits, Matthew Coleman and Alison Reilly investigate how the West’s perceived emptiness is filled with ideologies and memories.
(Re)contextualizing the West: A roundtable discussion with Andrew Hunter
Saturday, September 20th, 2014 | LeRoy Neiman Center, 37 S. Wabash Ave, 60603 | 12:00-2:00 p.m.
Andrew Hunter, curator of Canadian Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario, will lead a roundtable discussion with WEST artists and art historians, Elena Ailes, Lucas Briffa, Matthew Coleman and Alison Reilly. The group will question how remoteness, dislocation and mythology relate to communities and art practices within Chicago.
This event is supported by The School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Art History and Sculpture Department.
Photos by Wenli Liu
Lucas Briffa, enhanced matte paper, 38' x 7' 6", 2012
Elena Ailes, mixed media, 8' x 10' x 5', 2014
Lucas Briffa, pigment prints, 40" x 50", 2013
Matthew Coleman and Alison Reilly, 2013-14
Matthew Coleman and Alison Reilly, 2013-14
Matthew Coleman and Alison Reilly, 2013-14
Matthew Coleman and Alison Reilly, 2013-14
Photopolymer, 2009
Photopolymer, 2010
Photopolymer, 2010
Etching, 2009
Reduction linocut, 2009
Linocut, 2'x4', 2010
Adhesive reduction, 2010
Adhesive reduction, 2010
Monoprint and woodcut, 2010
Final in a series where a "FORGET" woodblock was printed over every print I made at Whitman College.
Woodcut over photolithograph, 2011