Singles

September 2 - November 7

We put so much focus and pressure on exhibitions as the primary way to deal with art and support the work of artists. Clearly, exhibitions provide an important and productive outlet for artists to work toward, but they don’t define the potential output for any artist. There’s always something else, something wrong, or something unsettled; that misfit piece that can’t find its way into an exhibition. Maybe someday it will, but why wait. With Singles, we seek to provide a context within which those works can be engaged without the need to be framed within an exhibition format. This is not a group show that assembles these wanderers, but rather a series in which we give each of these works its own time and space to be dealt with. But the singles we’re talking about always have two sides, which means each artist is paired with another. These considered pairings still leave plenty of room for isolated viewings of autonomous work, while also giving us a chance to enjoy whatever friction is generated in-between. Overall, there will be five such pairings shown in 11-day intervals over the course of the series. We look forward to many more exhibitions to come, but for now, we are excited to have the opportunity to look at things differently for a little while.

Scroll past text below for series documentation.

October 28 – November 7
Melina Ausikaitis and Pope.L

Our final pairing in the Singles series features a new fabric wall-work by Melina Ausikaitis and a new piece by Pope.L from his ongoing Skin Set project.

October 14 – 24
Devin T. Mays and Catherine Sullivan

Our fourth Singles pairing features a new sculpture from Devin T. Mays and a new video from Catherine Sullivan. Continuing his practice of questioning representational and operational dimensions of encountered objects, Devin T. Mays offers a new iteration of his ongoing work, Untitled (Cover). Catherine Sullivan’s untitled video is a study drawn from a larger project, Scenes from a Workbook on Redress. It simulates a sequence of encounters where an iconography from the past is pushed to sustain itself in the present so that its violations can be addressed.

September 30 – October 10
Jinn Bronwen Lee and Frank Piatek

Our third pairing in the Singles series features a recent painting from Jinn Bronwen Lee and a 1984 painting from the long-time Chicago painter and educator Frank Piatek. Although they are the results of two completely distinct approaches, both works demonstrate an intense commitment from each artist to engaging the transmutational possibilities of painting, inviting multi-sensory collisions of perception and thought to manifest visually. Two texts dealing with Piatek’s work in the context of other Chicago artists in the early 1980s can be read here.

September 16 – September 26
Miyoko Ito and John Pittman

Our second pairing features one of Miyoko Ito’s most important paintings, Island in the Sun (1978), alongside a new work by John Pittman comprising 24 pieces that he’s been creating since the start of Covid lockdown. A particularly significant dimension of this pairing is Pittman’s relationship to the Ito painting: it has been hanging in John’s home for 42 years where he spends time looking at it every morning before going to the studio.

September 2 – 12
Judith Geichman and Matthew Metzger

Our first pairing featured an ensemble work by Judith Geichman consisting of found materials and paintings alongside the four paintings that currently comprise Matthew Metzger’s On Holiday series, three of which had never been shown.

Documentation of Ausikaitis and Pope.L