EUTOPIA

Tania Pérez Córdova

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Installation view, Tania Pérez Córdova: Smoke, nearby, MCA Chicago, 2017. Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago

 

Tania Pérez Córdova
Smoke, nearby
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, Illinois [link]
April 15–August 20, 2017

An unabiding factor is crucial to Pérez Córdova’s objects: the unknown third party—referenced but never identified—generating mystery. This unspecified force, reliant on chance, is observed with the intimate details applied to them, which transfers into a form of generosity. There is a rich and potentially vast space between her sculptures encountered and the alternate lives they carry on, as their materials suggest, transforming them into intimate events. Always evolving, the viewer witnesses just one of many iterations within the larger episode that makes up the entirety of an object’s existence. This is only the present. Nothing is finite.

~ Lauren Fulton
images courtesy of MCA Chicago and the artist

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Alison Knowles

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Alison Knowles, The Boat Book, 2014-15 Wood and metal frame with silkscreen, digital print on silk, collage, assemblage, personal ephemera, beans, books, fishing net, photographs, ship anchor, fabric tunnel, electrical lights, audio recording, etc., Courtesy the artist and James Fuentes Gallery, New York Photo: Bryan Conley, Carnegie Museum of Art

Alison Knowles, The Boat Book, 2014-15
Wood and metal frame with silkscreen, digital print on silk, collage, assemblage, personal ephemera, beans, books, fishing net, photographs, ship anchor, fabric tunnel, electrical lights, audio recording, etc.,
Courtesy the artist and James Fuentes Gallery, New York
Photo: Bryan Conley, Carnegie Museum of Art

 

Alison Knowles
Forum Gallery
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh [link]
May 20-October 24, 2016

The Carnegie’s gallery is exactly as Dick Higgins described Knowles’s Big Book decades ago: as an “anthology,” an “accumulation” about situation and experience. Her survey, like this life-size, live-in publication and its ancestor, The Boat Book, cannot be described in any other way, except to borrow another of Higgins’s terms: intermedia. Objects spanning Knowles’s earliest Fluxus activities until now both excite and calm, puzzle and amaze, and ignite the senses. Sounds of beans shuffled by feet and the artist’s gentle voice float throughout, drawing in adults and children alike to experience excerpts of Knowles’s life, inseparable from her art.

Lauren Fulton
images courtesy of Carnegie Museum of Art and Lauren Fulton

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Barbara Kasten

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RCH-EKH_GF_Kasten

View of “Barbara Kasten: Stages”, 2015, Graham Foundation, Chicago. Photo by: RCH | EKH.

Barbara Kasten
Stages [link]
Madlener House, Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts
Chicago, IL
October 1, 2015–January 9, 2016

The historic Madlener House conjures, and transforms, established opinions about architecture for art institutions–nostalgia is consistently, pervasively present. Concurrent with the city’s Architecture Biennial, the Graham hosts Kasten, an artist conceptualizing designed spaces through meticulous arrangements of form and light, resulting in abstracted investigations unmistakably her own. An extensive archival dig, Stages unearths cyanotypes, paintings, and set designs for which Kasten has, until now, generally lacked attention. Most revealing is her Seated Form series (1972), handwoven chair constructions alongside diazotypes depicting bare female bodies, referencing the artist’s often forgotten history with fiber.

~ Lauren Fulton
images by RCH | EKH, courtesy of the Graham Foundation

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