OPENING RECEPTION: Friday February 22, 2008 6:00 to 9:00 PM
ON VIEW: Gallery 2A: Caleb Jones Lyons until March 29, 2008 Gallery 2D: CHANGING CITIES: Detroit until March 22, 2008
Artist Talk: March 20, 2008 7:00 PM Caleb Jones Lyons: Slow Dance backinblackisblackisblackisblackisback
CHICAGO: ThreeWalls announces two new exhibitions on view February 22, 2008 - March 22, 2008. In Gallery 2D, a group show curated by the Detroit Museum of New Art (MONA) and in SOLO, Gallery 2A, Caleb Jones Lyons (Chicago).
Sister cities in Americabs Midwest, both historically and culturally, Chicago and Detroit are swapping artists. In the last several decades, Detroit has suffered a growing loss of cultural history with the citybs art institutions debilitated by short-term memory and lack of local interest. Artists have quickly been lost to time, either through death or diaspora. While Detroit is famous for its music, it remains perfectly unknown for its art. Yet, the city itself rages with underground galleries and guerilla projects, and even boasts a renegade museum. All of which tag Detroit as the last frontier for contemporary art.
On the heels of its recent exhibition of Chicago artists in Michigan (curated by Paul Klein), the Museum of New Art (MONA) is launching their initiative in Chicago at ThreeWalls. CHANGING CITIES: Detroit is a bold response to forced entropy, an initial step in establishing a global art exchange that swaps Detroit artists and work with artists in other cities.
The range of medium and subject from these five Detroit artists infuses this initial exchange with the diversity of that underground scene - transplanted for a month to Chicago. With: Hartmut Austen, Jef Bourgeau, Mary Fortuna, Cyrus Karimipour and Alison Wong.
Slow Dance backinblackisblackisblackisblackisback is Caleb Jones Lyons multimedia meditation and immersive installation that invites an audience into a compelling environment of haunting totems, videos and social spaces in order to explore questions about power, intolerance and political engagement. Employing signs of existence, oppression, ritual, leisure, presence and absence, Lyons gathers together an unsettling group of objects and sounds that alter, disquiet and challenge the senses.
"Growing from the earth to the sun, a tree is an image of certain happiness. To perceive this image we must be immobile like the tree. When we are moving, it is the tree, which becomes the spectator. It is witness, equally, in the shape of chairs, tables and doors, to the more or less agitated spectacle of our life. The tree, having become a coffin, disappears into the earth. And when it is transformed into fire, it vanishes into air." -Rene Magritte
Caleb Jones Lyons is a graduate of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004. His work has been featured in galleries throughout the United States and abroad including: High Energy Constructs (Los Angeles, CA), 40000 (Chicago, IL), The Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY), Bemis Underground (Omaha, NE) among others. Along with collaborator Brandon Alvendia, Lyons founded and curated as artLedge before opening his recent project space, Old Gold, with Kathryn Scanlan.
The Museum of New Art (MONA) is a nonprofit, tax-exempt organization. MONA's exhibitions, programming, and operations are member-supported and privately funded through contributions from individuals, corporations, and foundations. Trustees of their won time and place, the Museum of New Art (MONA) presents and examines current art as a collective of all the active arts: performance, installation, music, dance, text, painting, sculpture, film, happening, documentary, new tech, video and theater. Visit them at www.detroitmona.com.
ThreeWalls is a nonprofit 501(c)3 organization dedicated to contemporary art practice and discourse. Through the residency program, SOLO project and quarterly publication Paper and Carriage, ThreeWalls aims to provide opportunities for experimentation, chance, critical dialogue and context for artists, curators and writers who are at pivotal points in their careers.
