This Is What We Know So Far
Chicago Art Department | Chicago, IL
September 10 - September 30, 2021
It feels like we are on the other side of something. What has shifted leaves something raw about the labor of making Art; who it serves, what it takes, what it’s for. A practice needs to hold a plan, a hope, of how to live, of what to do. Making is an action, and hopefully, a continuing.
The artists in this exhibition—Sara Condo, Ben Driggs, Leonardo Kaplan, Michael Lopez, and Liz McCarthy—are experimenting with their mediums on a path that’s thorny, gnarly, layered, and anti-finished. They’re getting into the muck, with materials, with feelings. There is a seemingly endless relationship with these materials that doesn’t feel comfortable or antagonizing, but open and exploratory. Clay, wood, fabric, aluminum, ink, pages, and plants are intuitive guides, informing the objects made, with their own agency in the process.
In their idiosyncratic forms, each artist is expressing the content of their lives: taking walks in nature, digging up a basement, buying a marker at CVS, pouring metal into sand, and dredging up the contents of their studio. There’s a digging, pressing, carving, bleeding, and layering with these everyday elements that gets to something primordial. The systems and repetition used are habitual, but sustainable and rhythmic.
There’s no big answer here, more like a shared mystical purpose, a spiritual pursuit that rewards those who seek it. Looking at the work of these artists in communion with each other feels to me like a lesson in living. There is a comfort in fucked-up, a resistance to completeness, a feral commitment to getting down to the essence of something. There’s an aesthetic of sincerity that feels accessible, like a guide for a fellow hobbyist. I’ll follow their lead, learning to embrace the vulnerable art of experimenting and revealing together.
Organized by Erin Nixon.
Whistle Built for Thirteen, 2019, glazed stoneware
