1/11: HOLDING // new works by SARAH BERKELEY & REGIN IGLORIA
HOLDING
new work by SARAH BERKELEY and REGIN IGLORIA
curated by LIZ MCCARTHY
January 11-25, 2015
Opening Reception and Performance: Sunday, Jan. 11, 4-8pm
Open Hours: Sundays & Mondays, noon-4pm
ACRE Projects
1913 W 17th Street
Under a high sun they crouch on their hands and knees over the gnarly flocks of grass. With simple household scissors and bare fists, they tear and chop the foliage corralled by cheerful orange ribbons. Through the steady progress of the task at hand, they are aware of life’s buzz all around them. The sound of their breath and bodies in repetitive motion intermingles with insects and breeze. With beads of sweat on their foreheads, they look behind at the once unruly ground they have sculpted. The fruit of their labor comes into focus; a trail, a path, a space opened for new possibility.
Sarah Berkley and Regin Igloria’s collaboration explores labor as a meditative exercise. In this ACRE Projects exhibition “Holding” the duo are creating faux and manipulated landscapes where they perform and document exhausting self-imposed tasks. Their constructed missions become arbitrary and unnecessarily difficult feats of athleticism and recreation. Through this heightened physicality, they transcend the banality of everyday routine to reach an active state of mindfulness.
On one half of the gallery they offer the viewer documentation from their performance in the ACRE landscape, where they mapped and cleared a walking trail with only menial hand tools. In the other half of the gallery the artists offer the audience a live performance that involves sustained gestures of physical support.
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SARAH BERKELEY Sarah Berkeley spent the first 6 years of her life on the North Shore of Massachusetts. She lived the following years of her childhood on a farm in Michigan and then in a log house in the Colorado mountains. Between high school and college she lived in the Southwest of Ireland. During her undergraduate studies she spent a year studying art in Madrid, Spain. At the completion of her degree she began her career as a web designer in New York City and in 2003 moved to Berlin, Germany to pursue her art career. While there, she co-founded the Berlin Collaborative Drawing Group and discovered a passion for teaching. After three years in Berlin, she returned to the United States to prepare for graduate school. Prior to her current position as assistant professor at Nebraska Wesleyan University, she taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.Berkeley holds an MFA in Art & Design from the University of Michigan (2011) and a BFA with Distinction in Studio Art from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (2002). She is the recipient of an Ameritas Grant, several Nebraska Wesleyan Faculty Development Grants, the City of Chicago Community Arts Assistance Program (CAAP) Grant, the Smucker-Wagstaff Research Grant, the Rackham Research Grant, and the University of Michigan School of Art & Design International Travel Grant.Her artwork has been collected and exhibited internationally including at Rutgers University, The Ann Arbor Film Festival, Defibrillator Gallery, New Capital, Roman Susan, Mana Contemporary, Chicago Artists’ Coalition, Work Gallery Detroit and Mercury 20. Her artwork has been published in Quarterly West, the Archways Magazine, and OVERVIEW by LAND and SEA. She has completed residencies at The Ragdale Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, ACRE, the Cedar Point Biological Station and 8550 OHIO.
More information about Sarah Berkeley can be found at sarahberkeley.com
REGIN IGLORIA maintains a studio practice in Chicago, IL, which revolves around teaching and serving as an arts administrator. He teaches studio courses regularly at Marwen and has also taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago Free School, Anderson Ranch ArtsCenter, Rhode Island School of Design, Terra Museum of American Art, and the Museum ofContemporary Art. In 2010, he founded North Branch Projects, a community book binding project based in the Albany Park neighborhood of Chicago. Currently he serves as the Director ofResidencies & Fellowships at The Ragdale Foundation. His work has been exhibited and collected internationally, including the ANTI Contemporary Art Festival in Finland, Out of SitePerformance Festival Chicago, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, The Franklin, Zg Gallery, and The Center forBook Arts NYC. He is a recipient of a 3Arts Teaching Artist Award, Propeller Grant, 96 AcresProject Grant, and an Americans for the Arts Fellowship. Residencies include Ucross, ACRE, and The Wormfarm Institute. He received his MFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design and his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
More information about Regin Igloria can be found at reginigloria.com
LIZ MCCARTHY is an artist and arts organizer based out of Chicago. Her work uses photography, sculpture, and performance to explore the psychological framing of experience through elements of perceptual phenomena. Her curatorial work acts as an extension of the themes in her studio practice. Before joining ACRE as a curatorial fellow she was the co-founder and curatorial director of Roxaboxen Exhibitions. She has participated in residencies such as Atlantic Center for the Arts, ACRE, and High Concept Laboratories, and has been honored with fellowship support from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, Illinois Arts Council, and Chicago’s Department of Tourism. She will be attending the Banff Centre residency for her studio practice in March.
ACRE (Artists’ Cooperative Residency and Exhibition) was founded in 2010 with the ambition to provide the arts community with an affordable, cooperative, and dialogue-oriented residency program. The residency itself takes place each summer in rural southwest Wisconsin and brings together artists from across disciplines and levels of experience to create a regenerative community of cultural producers. Over the course of the following year ACRE endeavors to further support its residents by providing venues for exhibitions, idea exchange, interdisciplinary collaboration, and experimental projects.
More information about ACRE can be found at www.acreresidency.org.