calendario eventi  :: 

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19/9/2013

Two exhibitions

Kavi Gupta, Chicago

Roxy Paine
Apparatus

Kavi Gupta CHICAGO | BERLIN is proud to announce its first exhibition with New York based artist Roxy Paine entitled Apparatus. Apparatus will be the inaugural exhibition at our newest gallery location at 219 N. Elizabeth St. and Paine's first solo exhibition in Chicago.

Roxy Paine's work has challenged the perception of visual language and how it affects the understanding of our environments since the genesis of his career in the early nineties. Focusing on objects and their fabrication, Paine strives to evoke a desire to understand how meaning can transcend through time, using our conventional relationships with the visual as an anchor for the exploration of truth. Paine's contemplative work has ventured into two distinct, yet related, avenues of artistic production. Highly acclaimed for his synthetic replicas of organic forms such as fungi and trees, intricately executed with impressive mastery and ingenuity, and his computer-driven machines programed to auto-produce works of art, Paine presents a complex arena where the balance between what we know to be true and what we can learn from a deeper contemplative observation is considered. A truth dependent on our willingness to accept the beauty in the imperfections within nature and language itself, a balance in paradoxical poetics.

With Apparatus, Roxy Paine introduces a new chapter in his work, a series of large scale dioramas. Inspired by spaces and environments designed to be activated via human interaction, a fast-food restaurant and a control room, the dioramas present spaces and objects which are hand carved from birch and maple wood and formed from steel, encased and frozen in time, void of human presence, making their inherent function obsolete. Rooted in the Greek language, diorama translates to "through that which is seen", a definition that has evolved throughout time as dioramas became conventionally known as physical windowed and encased rooms used as educational tools. Paine transforms the environments on display by using the diorama's traditional experience as a tool to create a contemplative experience where what we see behind the glass transitions between being real and being a mere shell of something real. These dioramas are not intended to be specific or accurate replicas, but merely gestures of their real life inspirations. As Paine himself states; "they are translations from one visual language to another". The environments ask the viewer's to consider their pre-conceived knowledge of the mechanics and functions of a fast food restaurant and that of a control room, as well as open up to the possibility of how this knowledge can, and will, change through time and context.

Japanese culture has a term known as Wabi-Sabi, the idea of art and architecture addressing how the natural change and uniqueness of objects helps us connect to the world and how we can transcend significance and meaning with inevitable change and time. Paine has constantly innovated ways that address impervious knowledge and challenged it with almost impossible transformations, taking into consideration the concepts behind Wabi-Sabi to find a balance in the inevitable changing nature of the world. Though human language relies heavily on social convention and learning, Paine strives to push the boundaries of that process. Paine's dioramas, along with his previous bodies of work, serve as reminders of the knowledge and enlightenment that comes from actual, real, experience with our natural and fabricated worlds.

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Sep 20 – Nov 9, 2013
Theaster Gates
Accumulated Affects of Migration

Kavi Gupta CHICAGO | BERLIN is pleased to announce an exhibition by Theaster Gates entitled Accumulated Affects of Migration. This exhibition marks an expansion on Gate's Documenta 13 project in 2012, 12 Ballads for the Huguenot House, in which raw material from a house at 6901 S. Dorchester in Chicago's Grand Crossing neighborhood was shipped to Kassel, Germany, and used to mend and partially repair a historic building known as the Huguenot House. The project resulted in a poetic exchange of community, music and architectural transformation. During its restoration the Huguenot House was home to carpenters and students, a core of whom originated from the artist's native Chicago and traveled with the artist to Germany. As Gates and his team merged one historical building with the other, they formed both functional objects and aesthetic compositions with the materials that emerged from the repair. The resulting objects play tribute to the marriage of the two original structures they derived from as well as serve as ephemeral documentations of the performances and interventions that activated the Huguenot House while Gates and his team inhabited the building.

Accumulated Affects of Migration shares its title with the series of performances Theaster Gates presented with his exhibition 13th Ballad, currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, an exhibition which jointly acts as an extension of the Documenta 13 project. Performance and song were at the core of 12 Ballads for the Huguenot House. During demolition of 6901 S. Dorchester, Gates, and his collaborative performance group The Black Monks of Mississippi, recorded a series of twelve songs in the south side Chicago building. These songs would become the 12 Ballads and were screened through out the Huguenot House during the run of the project. The 12 Ballads were accompanied in Kassel with a series of live performances by Theaster Gates and the Black Monks of Mississippi, a component to the project that created a community out of the students, carpenters and locals whom gathered at the Huguenot House. A major focus of Accumulated Affects of Migration lies on the objects which were part of these performances, such as the stage the performers used as well as Fire Access Stairs (2012), a row of stairs that served as sitting bleachers for viewers to projections of the 12 Ballads. As the original material from 6901 S. Dorchester was shipped abroad, repurposed, merged with the Huguenot House, engaged and activated, then shipped back to Chicago, it has transformed in relation to the many contexts it has been placed within, drawing focus on the affects history plays on material as well how this material influences its surrounding.

Image: Roxy Paine

Kavi Gupta
219 N. Elizabeth St. Chicago IL 60607

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