The gallery is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of sculptural works by Chicago artist Andrea Myers. In the Project Room is an installation by EC Brown in collaboration with Paul Nudd.
Andrea Myers work is concerned with an exploration of the space between the two-dimensional and three-dimensional. Using hybrids of painting, printmaking and sculpture, she creates densely fabricated works that transcend their materiality and take on new meanings. From simple material such as paper, fabric and wood, Myers builds floor sculptures and wall pieces that reference the turbulent behavior of nature and mimic everyday subtle shifts that occur in it.
In a current series of paper sculptures, the artist uses multitudes of open fields of color screen-printed onto individual sheets of paper. By tearing and stacking large numbers of them, she builds spontaneous sculptural forms that recall the construction and deconstruction found in naturally occurring phenomena- erosion, glacial formation, cracking sidewalks and peeling paint.
In other works, such as "Plateau", it is an additive, rather than subtractive process that lends the piece its weight. By stacking hundreds of layers of cut fabric into a lopsided, amorphous configuration, she is able to recreate in miniature the eons-long process of the formation of landscape. As with much of her work, it operates on two opposite planes simultaneously; as a representation of the passing of time it can be seen as the erosion of the landscape, or conversely, like the pouring lava of a volcanic eruption, it can be seen as a form resulting from many ages of accumulation.
Using painting as foundation that inspires her color and composition and physical and material processes that lead the sculptural elements, Myers produces works that are visually succulent and conceptually fertile.
Andrea Myers has exhibited at the Contemporary Arts Workshop, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts' Glassel School of Art and The Jones Center in Austin, TX. Her work can also been seen this winter at the Aqua Wynwood Art Fair, Miami (December).
EC Brown is an artist based in Chicago, where he is a co-conspirator in the curating project known as COMA (California Museum of Art). This will be his second solo exhibition at the gallery.
Brown will be presenting a series of paintings on panel in conjunction with an installation conceived by the artist and Paul Nudd. Employing Nudd to create a wall mural of large text, Brown plans to hang his trademark panoramic paintings around the mural. The installation will curiously pit the overbearing text against the constrained hanging arrangement of Brown's painting.
As he is wont to do, Brown forces these contrasts and constrictions within the room just as he commands them within his paintings. Using a long, narrow format for his narrative paintings, he forces an interchange between the flat representation nature of the painting and its object presence. Populated with figures from the artist preoccupation with cinema, utopian/ utilitarian fantasies, war, social hierarchies and subcultures among other inspirations, the paintings read as "data strings"- cinematic tableaus that act as syncretic inventories of media culture.
The exhibition is November 17 - December 15, with an artists' reception on Saturday, November 17 from 6-9pm.
