February 9 - March 30, 2013 Reception: February 9, 5 - 8PM
Kavi Gupta CHICAGO is pleased to present Johanna Billing's most recent film, 'I'm gonna live anyhow until I die'. Billing’s videos weave music, movement and rhythm - placing subtle emphasis on the individual within representations of changing societies. In her work Billing directs the participants and puts in place a series of improvisations around the notion of performance and the possibility it holds to explore issues of the public and the private. The protagonists in Billing’s videos all play themselves but take part in staged situations that oscillate between documentary and fiction, as a multi-layered interpretation of a place.
I'm gonna live anyhow until I die (2012) is a video work set in Rome, that has its origins in a project to mark the 150th anniversary of the Unification of Italy, co-commissioned by Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, and the MAC, Belfast, during 2010-2012.
The main characters are five children who run around the streets of Rome, doing whatever they like after abandoning their parents at the restaurant, Al Biondo Tevere1. After running through the park of the Roman Aqueduct, a courtyard in the 1930s working class district of Testaccio, and Ostia's Seadrome, the children finally arrive in an empty school in the centre of Rome where time seems to have stood still. The old classroom has been turned into storage and here they begin to play with the obsolete pedagogical tools and technological instruments they find. It is as if they are trying to understand what to do with them or what they could be used for. Little by little, each child begins to compose black shapes on sheets of drawing paper folded in half, creating blots that resemble those of the Rorschach test. The children’s imaginary journey takes them back and forth in time, place, and genre, freely following their own pace and rhythm.
Harnessing her talent for research, Billing used Lazio, Rome as source material, drawing on traditions, the human psyche, film, and education. She references Italian Neorealism and as well as psychoanalytical workshop techniques. Visiting Rome during the demonstrations against university reforms in autumn 2010, Billing began to focus the work on the future of the younger generation and the populist political ideology, which has been undermining the education system. The work is also haunted by the life and death of Pier Paolo Pasolini, who anticipated the social and cultural changes that would sweep the country at the end of the 1970s. The project is also a loving tribute to pedagogical heroes such as Bruno Munari and his tactile workshops for kids. It also champions the early tradition of Italian filmmakers who in their often biographical films about the 40s and 50s, focused on the freedom of children exploring their city as a way to reflect upon historical and societal changes.
The accompanying soundtrack arranged by Billing features a Romany violin, upright bass, whistling, and improvised interpretations of the songs Cariocinesi and Mechanics (originally written by the Italian progressive experimentalist Franco Battiato), serving as homage to Battiato and his classic concept album Foetus from 1972. The final result is the product of a meticulous editing process that places equal focus on both the visual material and sound recording.
Johanna Billing was born in 1973 in Jönkoping, Sweden. She attended Konstfack, International College of Arts, Crafts and Design, in Stockholm where she has lived and worked since graduating in 1999. Recent major solo exhibitions include "I’m gonna live anyhow until I die”, The Mac, Belfast, (2012), “I'm Lost without your Rhythm", Modern Art Oxford, ”Moving In, Five films”, Grazer Kunstverein, Graz, (2010), ”Tiny Movements, ACCA, Melbourne, ”I’m lost without your rhythm, Camden Art Centre (2009), ”Taking Turns”, Kemper Museum, Kansas City; ”This is How We Walk On The Moon”, Malmö Konsthall, Malmö (2008); ”Forever Changes”, Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel and ”Keep on Doing”, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee (2007). She has participated in survey shows such as 4th Auckland Triennial, ”Last ride in a hot balloon”, Auckland (2010), Documenta 12, Kassel (2007); Singapore Biennale (2006), 9th Istanbul Biennial; 1st Moscow Biennale (2005) and 50th Venice Biennale (2003).
MATTHEW METZGER Waver
February 9 - March 30, 2013 Reception: February 9, 5 - 8PM
Kavi Gupta Gallery CHICAGO is proud to present Matthew Metzger's Waver, the artist's first exhibition with the gallery.
The three works in this exhibition stem from Metzger's ongoing inquiry into Abstraction, and its relationship to the copy as a way of positioning painting between the limits of figuration and the sign.
Previously known to viewers as Ghost, a work that Metzger originally exhibited at the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago,Apparition (2013) now stands simultaneously as a new work and a ‘picture’ of its past. The approach here is epitomic of Metzger's practice as it oscillates between sign and object, image and body. Apparition retains all of the marks and scrapes on its surface from weather and traction as museum goers leaned against and brushed its surface throughout its duration at the Smart Museum. Marks that when framed and re-presented as such, serve to depict its past signifying certain histories.
The other two exhibited works – entitled The Other Side of One and Three Signs (Left) and The Other Side of One and Three Signs (Right) (both works 2013) - emphasize Metzger's ongoing interest into the awkward incongruity found between a sign and its support/ground. The shape refers to a particular street sign, as each is painted Ultimatte Green (a specific video green used for maintaining extreme detail in a subjects silhouette while compositing two images in television post-production) all-the-while functioning as a provisional “ground” for issuing the body an artificial and temporary context to occupy through mediation. Each of these two works also depict the shadow of each side of a clamp that becomes twisted in its depiction as it points outward, in front of the paintings surface, to the space of viewing.
Likewise, here the viewing space of Waver again points outward, as Metzger has chosen to paint the walls of this exhibition the color of the specific viewing room at The National Gallery in Washington D.C. where Edouard Manet’s painting The Dead Man (The Dead Toreador)” currently hangs. For Metzger, this particular Manet painting has been the entry point to his use of the Scuba "Diver Down” emblem project since 2010. For this reason, color serves as a vector, a backdrop, and an atmosphere simultaneously.
Like many of Metzger's paintings, the works draw such great attention to the material qualities of the represented thing that what is represented inherently begins to abstract itself, obfuscating one's notions of language and naming. The recurring embodiment of this in Metzger's work is the sign. Much like the figure in its relationship to figure painting, Metzger employs the sign – SCUBA signs and other transportation signs - as a flattening of what is represented and its form. For the artist, the dismantling of the historical distance between a form and its content can be mobilized by the abstraction found when the two become indistinguishably close.
UPCOMING EXHIBITION
McARTHUR BINION Selected Works from the 1970s April 6, 2013
