1/13: SOFT GROUND // new works by EMILY CLAYTON + EILEEN MUELLER
SOFT GROUND
new works by EMILY CLAYTON + EILEEN MUELLER
JANUARY 12-16, 2012
Opening Reception: Friday Jan 13th, 6-9pm
Open Hours: Thursday Jan 12th 4-7pm, Saturday Jan 14th 12-6pm
Roots & Culture
1034 N Milwaukee, Chicago 60622
Left: Eileen Mueller Aleks (after Eleanor), 32″ x 40″ Archival pigment print, 2011
Right: Emily Clayton Sweep, 40” x 63” acrylic, dye on cotton 2011
SOFT GROUND
Emily Clayton’s recent work began as a series informed by sunsets, occult photography and stage curtains. Charged with spacial impossibilities, each are asking the viewer for the same thing, to willfully suspend disbelief. Distilling from this a sense of illusion and visual deception, the works are reduced to an atmospheric gradient of color. The series examines the two dimensional plane of an artificial horizon in relation to the stage and studio photography. They are backdrops, scenery, simulated landscapes all void of subject or performer. Situated within the historical tenet of process driven practices the work aims to exhibit a calculated control of material and form.
Eileen Mueller’s work focuses on the material history of the photographic image and its role in confounding unwritten or inaccessible histories. Her latest work links her own practice within communal educational spaces and the historic progeny of the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College. While making a pilgrimage to Black Mountain, Mueller sought out the vistas wherein the landscape served as an emulsion, fixing the ghosts of American Modernism. Through embedding her own images into an anomic archive that also contains material mined from historic materials she poeticizes existing histories to build a mythology of the artist.
EMILY CLAYTON is a Nashville based artist who works primarily in sculpture, installation and painting. After receiving her BFA from University of Tennessee in 2004 she spent several years in Chicago helping to organize exhibitions and events with the Co-Prosperity Sphere, Version Festival and Mule Magazine. Her work has been shown in Chicago, New York and Nashville.
More information about Emily Clayton can be found at www.emilyclayton.com
EILEEN MUELLER has studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she recently received her BFA. She is the recipient of the Fred Endsley Memorial Fellowship and the World Less Travelled Grant as well as a finalist for the Gelman Travel Fellowship. Eileen recently showed inCeaseless Blooms in Jobless Colors at Johalla Projects and is scheduled to show at the Kohler Museum this coming fall. Eileen is the co-founder of GURL DON’T BE DUMB, a curatorial project that is currently based out of Chicago.
More information about Eileen Mueller can by found at www.eileenmueller.com
ROOTS & CULTURE The mission of Roots & Culture Contemporary Art Center is to provide exhibition opportunities for leading-edge emerging artists and to develop the city of Chicago’s cultural community as a center for art production and a destination for artistic discourse. Through two person shows, curated group shows, lectures, community gatherings and time arts events, Roots & Culture aims to provide a platform for the inventive practices of young artists. This programming helps to develop a dynamic community for the arts in Chicago and dialogue with the international discourse of contemporary art. Roots & Culture is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Programming and general operating costs are partially funded by The Illinois Arts Council, a state agency and The Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelly Foundation.
More information about Roots & Culture can be found at www.rootsandculturecac.org