April 13 - June 8, 2013 Reception for the artist Saturday, April 13, 4-7pm moniquemeloche, 2154 W Division, Chicago, IL 60622
Artist talk @ Gallery 400, Tuesday, April 9, 6pm Voices lecture series, 400 South Peoria Street
Kate Levant was born and raised in Chicago, and it is with great pleasure that moniquemeloche announces her first solo exhibition in her hometown. This body of work is comprised of the artist's latest material investigations into the functioning of objects and their properties. She asks much of her materials, to be at once legible, coded, and acted upon, but also asserts that they are indifferent to her physical control over them as they become art objects. Her relationship to objects (that at times may stand in for bodies) is charged, sometimes violent.
"When I step away from the work I am making right now, the applied treatments appear to pronounce a raw kind of struggle with the physical properties of the materials involved. It all seems stressed. While this way of working is common for me (a kind of default manner of visual/physical activity), I think I'm Letting things disturb me a bit more right now...
The material, the substances and subjects themselves, seem to be what has the whip in them. Of course I am working ON them, transposing material through these corrugated surfaces, slides, flaps and folds; but I seem to need to alter my role each instant: content provider or shield, inspector or sieve, reactor or reactor, etc. I don't feel in charge of the dynamic." - Kate Levant artist statement 2013
This agonistic relation to materials is complicated by the artist's first-ever use of objects traditionally designated as "feminine" (hosiery, earrings, etc.). Her new body of work shows a fresh approach to negotiating gender codes and working with readily available "poor" materials. The exhibition as a whole presents a slice of time like one of the raw, glossy snapshots in her installation, a moment frozen and extracted from her intensive studio process.
Kate Levant (born 1983 Chicago, IL, currently lives and works Amsterdam, The Netherlands) Levant is currently in her second year as artist-in-residence at the Rijksakademie. Her work was featured in the 2012 Whitney Biennial and included in other group exhibitions at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe (upcoming); The Island, organized by LAND /OHWOW Flagler Memorial Island, Miami; St. Joost Akademie, the Netherlands; Center for Creative Studies, Detroit; and Frontroom Gallery, Cleveland to name a few. Her most recent solo show at Zach Feuer Gallery in NY opened only a week before Hurricane Sandy. Levant earned a BFA at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and an MFA at Yale University School of Art where she received the Susan H. Whedon Award in 2010.
Also on view at moniquemeloche...
on the wall:
Sanford Biggers Ago
April 13 - June 8, 2013
Reception for the artist Saturday, April 13, 4-7pm moniquemeloche, 2154 W Division, Chicago, IL 60622
For his first exhibition with moniquemeloche, Biggers will activate the street-level storefront "on the wall" project space with a site-specific installation emerging from his recent work with civil war-era and pre-1900 quilts.
Abstract grounds of patchwork are overlaid with painting and mark-making and superimposed with shapes from the artist's ever-growing repertoire of iconic or loaded images. Though the extent of their use has been contested, Biggers plays off the notion that quilts were used on the Underground Railroad as signposts signaling "stations" or safe houses." He creates a complex vista across which his protagonist (the vague outline of a well-known photograph of a slave's scarred back) takes in a suggested landscape. In a stark reversal of the implied manifest destiny of much Romantic landscape painting, here Biggers complicates and reassesses this historical narrative.
Sanford Biggers (born 1970 Los Angeles, CA, lives and works New York, NY) is an interdisciplinary artist who works in film/video, installation, sculpture, music, and performance. Biggers's art frequently references African American ethnography, hip hop music, Buddhism, African spirituality, Indo-European Vodoun, Jazz, Afrofuturism, urban culture and icons from Americana. An L.A. native, he has lived and worked in New York City since 1999. He received a BA from Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, a MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Biggers has been included in several notable exhibitions such as: Prospect 1/New Orleans Biennial, Illuminations at the Tate Modern, Performa 07 in NY, the Whitney Biennial, The Here and Now at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, and Freestyle at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Solo exhibitions include Ringling Museum, Sarasota FL (which travels to Virginia Commonwealth University, School of the Arts Anderson Gallery this May); MassMoCA; Brooklyn Museum of Art; Sculpture Center NY; Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum; Portland Art Museum; Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, Poland; Contemporary Art Center Cincinnati; Contemporary Art Museum Baltimore; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; and the Berkeley Art Museum. He is presently Assistant Professor at Columbia University's Visual Arts program.
Special thanks to The Commission of Wicker Park / Bucktown (SSA #33) for their support of the on the wall series.
For more information, please contact the gallery.
moniquemeloche 2154 W. Division St Chicago IL 60622 773.252.0299 Tues - Sat 11-6 www.moniquemeloche.com
Art Brussels art fair: Dan Gunn, Sheree Hovsepian, Karen Reimer April 18-21, 2013
ArtPad San Francisco art fair: Kendell Carter, Ebony G. Patterson, Carrie Schneider May 16-19, 2013
Cheryl Pope, Just Yell @ mmg June 22-August 3, 2013
