the archives

Diana Guerrero-Maciá (main space) and Jessie Mott (project room)

threewallsSOLO

NOVEMBER 2 – DECEMBER 15, 2012
OPENING RECEPTION: NOVEMBER 2, 6-9PM

Artist Talk: December 1st, 2 PM

With hybrid material use bringing into conflict modernist histories of collage, craft, textiles, design and painting, Diana Guerrero-Maciá’s work suggests a new relationship between these histories. She makes surfaces and objects that question their own classification and reference literary and scientific representations of archetypes, symbols, and signs through her interests in abstraction, representation, and semiotics. Needlework and handcrafts have a revolutionary past, frequently used as symbols of dissent in the Arts & Crafts movement; they are also a source of innovation in contemporary practices.  By employing hand mechanical processes in her works, Guerrero-Maciá adds both a dialogue of material protest as well as a dismantling of art and craft hierarchies. The myriad of archetypical references her work includes, in no particular order; 15th century philosophical attempts to describe universal expansion and subsequent order, connectivity charts & maps, hyper sentimental iconography, punk rock graphics and design, Soviet propaganda, sports ephemeral & fanaticism, psychedelic & free-love memorabilia, anarchist icons, firearm targets, color wheels, and Bernini's St. Peter's stained glass window. 

The Uncertainty of Signs is a body of work comprised of thirty-two pieces, all using Guerrero-Maciá’s densely researched and complex deployment of destabilized signs and signifiers. The five large textiles in the project reference archetypical textiles of war, territorial battles, pastoral, and innocence lost. Using the compositional frameworks and color forms of both punk rock and Soviet ephemera, propaganda describing war is pitted against psychedelic rock, making evident hopes and failures of past problematic "golden ages." The exhibition also features a series of twenty-six small fabric and paper collages titled "a-z" that each reference letters of the alphabetical framework of the nautical semaphore flag system and Shakespearean characters who shift in either gender or physical presence and absence. Like semaphores, each of these twenty-six pieces represents one letter of the classical Latin alphabet.  Lastly, included in the exhibition, is a functionally designed set of benches titled "Let x=x," referencing the reflexive property of equality in mathematics and a Laurie Anderson song.  "Let x=x" is built entirely of reclaimed old-growth pine salvaged from a reconstructed 19th century Chicago worker’s cottage.

Diana Guerrero-Maciá’s solo shows include Artpace; San Antonio, The Museum of Contemporary Art; Chicago, Bodybuilder & Sportsman, Forum for Contemporary Art; St. Louis, Tony Wight Gallery, and Traywick Contemporary; Berkeley, CA.  Group shows include the Pera Museum; Istanbul, The Bronx Museum; NYC, Arena, LA, The Denver Museum of Contemporary Art, and MOCA Detroit.  She has created several public art commissions for the Public Art Fund, NYC, and the Chicago Public Art Foundation. Visiting artists lectures include, University of Nevada Las Vegas Graduate School of Art, Harold Arts Residency, Burren College of Art; Ballyvaughan, Ireland, Savannah College of Art & Design, Graduate Painting Department, National Institute of Design; Ahmedabad, India & Washington University, St. Louis School of Art & Architecture. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Fiber & Material Studies Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Guerrero-Maciá earned an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, a BFA from Villanova University, and studied at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She has been awarded the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant, multiple residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Senior Residency at Oregon College of Art & Craft, and a letterpress residency at Penland School of Craft.  She lives with her husband and son in Chicago.

 

Jessie Mott will debut A Day for Cake and Accidents, which completes the trilogy of short collaborative animations with Steve Reinke. Mott creates the drawings, writes the script, and records the voices; Reinke constructs the soundtrack and animates her drawings. A Day for Cake and Accidents features a cast of animal characters - each of a different, though often indeterminate, species - who struggle with impending astrological despair and engage in absurdist dialogs, confessing various melancholic desires and transgressive secrets in poetic cartoon abjection. As in the previous Mott/Reinke collaborations, non-actors from the local art community will voice the characters and the incidental music will be constructed from Madonna and Karlheinz Stockhausen samples. Mott will also include drawings and assorted sculptural objects that are informed by the video.

Jessie Mott is an artist living and working in Chicago, IL, using a variety of media that includes drawing, painting, collage, sculpture, and writing about a menagerie of human, animal and celestial bodies. Her work has recently been included in group shows at devening projects + editions, The Hyde Park Art Center, Gallery 400, and Swimming Pool Project Space. Her writing has been featured in Blast Counterblast, edited by Steve Reinke and Anthony Elms and published by Mercer Union/WhiteWalls. Mott received an MFA from Northwestern University and a BFA from New York University. She lives and works in Chicago, IL.

Steve Reinke is an artist and writer best known for his work in video. His work is in many collections including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Centre Pompidou (Paris) and the National Gallery (Ottawa), and has screened at many festivals including Sundance, Rotterdam, Oberhausen and the New York Video Festival. In 2006 he received the Bell Canada Video Award. His research interests include digital video production, motion graphics/animation, rhetorical and narrative strategies for visual art, the voice and psychoanalysis. 

Mott and Reinke have collaborated on two other video projects: Everybody (2009) and Blood and Cinnamon (2010). Both have screened widely in the US and international venues such as: International Film Festival Rotterdam; Kino Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art, Berlin, Germany; Impakt, Utrecht, Netherlands; International Short Film Festival Oberhausen; Reelout Queer Film + Video Festival, Kingston, Ontario, Canada; VIDEOEX International Experimental Film & Video Festival, Zürich, Switzerland; Sydney Underground Festival; Power Plant/Pleasure Dome, Toronto, ON, Canada; The Calgary International Film Festival; the Chicago Underground Film Festivals - Best Animation Award (2010, Everybody); Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art; video_dumbo, Brooklyn, NY.
 

www.jessiemott.com