Karen Reimer The Domestic Partnership of Heaven and Hell November 19 - December 31, 2011
Karen Reimer works to establish something more complex, more ambiguous, more symbiotic than the traditional oppositional binary relationships that ground so much of our culture. By combining the tactics and aesthetics of conceptual art with the tropes of domestic decoration, Reimer pushes concept and material, art and labor, language and linens, utopia and realism, heaven and hell into the same space.
In this body of work, Reimer exchanges language for the imagery of stylized nature so typical of domestic decoration. Starting with the literalism of replacing an image of flowers with the word "flowers", Reimer embroiders quotations in which that word appears on pillowcases. Ranging from the poetic to the pedagogical, these quotations address the practices of craft and decoration and the assumptions and debates surrounding those practices, with several quotes taken from scholars and philosophers of the Arts and Crafts Movement. Reimer is interested in revisiting that movement's ideas about craft, manual labor, learning, domesticity, etc., as they translate into the contemporary digital age. The arrangement of the text on the pillowcases borrows equally from the traditions of embroidered pillowcase decoration and the formatting of language on computer screens, for example the blue boxing of selected words or the red strike-through of deletions when tracking changes.
Embroidering the quotations onto pillowcases is both an examination via embodiment or acting out of the ideas, and also an attempt to put art into the realm of private domestic experience. What Reimer produces are potentially useful objects that could easily be slipped onto your pillows…
Karen Reimer (American, b. 1958, lives Chicago) is a recipient of both the Artadia Individual Artist Grant and the Richard A. Driehaus Individual Artist Award. She has had solo exhibitions at Goshen College Art Gallery, Indiana; moniquemeloche gallery, Chicago; and Rochester Art Center, Minnesota. Her work has been included in group shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Contemporary Craft Museum, Portland, Oregon; and Wallspace Gallery, New York, among others. Reimer's works have been featured in the edited volumes Contemporary Textiles: The Fabric of Fine Art (Black Dog Publishing, 2008); The Object of Labor: Art, Cloth, and Cultural Production (MIT Press, 2007); By Hand: The Use of Craft in Contemporary Art (Princeton Architectural Press, 2010); and Limited Language—Rewriting Design: Responding to a Feedback Culture (Birkhauser Architecture, 2009). She won the Women's Caucus for the Arts President's Award in 2010, and is an adjunct instructor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
*Please join us for a conversation with Karen Reimer and curator/writer/Founder of non-profit Threewalls Shannon Stratton at 6pm on Thursday December 15th at moniquemeloche.
Cheryl Pope A Silent I Sept 9 - December 31, 2011
Since the opening of her "on the wall" project in September, Cheryl Pope has met with local teenagers involved in The MCA Creative Agency, a newly launched program at the Museum of Contemporary Art where teens collectively explore what art is. Together they have discussed the parameters of the A Silent I series and their collaboration will result in Part 3 of this very public installation. These personal statements made by teenagers, the difference between truths and lies, and the implications of exhibiting these banners have been the focus of their discussion and Pope will work with the teens to curate multiple grouping of banners selected from the entire 20-part series to run until the end of the year.
More on A Silent I: As an artist-in-residence at Chicago Public School Lindblom Math and Science Academy in 2010, Pope asked the high school students to anonymously submit one truth and one lie about themselves, without designating which was which, as part of a collaborative art project. Of the 125 submitted statements, Pope selected 20 to reproduce in the style of athletic championship banners and installed them in the Lindblom gymnasium for their initial presentation. Addressing complex issues of identity, self-worth, and inter-personal relationships, this celebratory series speaks to all ages, so we invited Pope to make a more public installation “on the wall.” Grouping the unlabeled truths and lies in various combinations, banners installed for Part 1 dealt with issues of internal identity while banners installed for Part 2 referenced physical identities. Part 3 is curated in collaboration with The MCA Creative Agency.
Cheryl Pope (American, b. 1980, lives Chicago) received a Masters in Design in 2010 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, which was supported by a Full Tuition Merit Scholarship, and Bachelors in Fine Arts from the same in 2003. Her work has been in exhibitions at venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Morgan Conservatory in Cleveland, the Evanston Art Center, Swimming Pool Projects, and the School of the Art Instituteof Chicago, to name a few. In 2009, she was selected for Art Chicago’s exhibition New Insight, a selection of the top graduate students from the best art schools in the country, and was named one of the “Rising Stars” in the Fall issue of CS Interiors. Pope and her work have also been discussed in The New York Times and The Cleveland Scene. She has been the studio manager for artist Nick Cave since 2003 and credits him and his work as a great influence on her practice. Pope is part-time faculty at the School of Art Institute Fashion Department in Chicago. This September Pope had a solo exhibition at Dorsch Gallery in Miami, which received rave reviews in publications like Artslant, New Times Miami and more.
