4/16: GROUP HUG // new work by Daniel Baird, Paul Erschen, Matt Nichols, Betsy Odom and Aay Preston-Myint
GROUP HUG
new work by
Daniel Baird, Paul Erschen, Matt Nichols, Betsy Odom and Aay Preston-Myint
Opening Reception: Saturday, April 16, 7-10pm
Open hours preview: Friday, April 15, 6-9pm
Co-Prosperity Sphere
3219 S Morgan Street
GROUP HUG brings together a number of ACRE residents and staff working primarily with large sculptures. Each of these artists addresses an awareness of the body and human scale while striking careful and nuanced stances with regard to the contemporary discourse around (un)monumentality. Their objects, wrought carefully from an uncommon array of quotidian and rare materials, speak with a clarity of content and voice that belie their complicated critical and formal conceits. Most of this work stands outside of today’s retreat into formalism, and instead make relatively direct reference to specific, nameable forms. The pieces therefore abut conversations that exist outside of the aesthetic, treating with sentimentality and incisive thought conversations of scientific ambition, queerness, modernity’s decay, sport, and ritual. ACRE is proud to present these artists, all deeply invested in producing objects that both impress with the evidence of their making, and generously open conversations that are both accessible and complex.
Daniel Baird‘s recent work stresses an awareness of the body through technological means. Utilizing materials and replications of objects developed by NASA, these structures evoke an existential encounter and emphasize a connection to the fundamentally human element in the construction of these technologies.
Paul Erschen’s recent assemblage and archive projects include Hydrocal castings of industrial waste products and ongoing collections of discarded drug bags and condoms. Paul’s use of transformative physical processes, such as mold making, screen printing, and faux-painting, cloud his stubbornly controlled installations with suspicion and emptiness.
Examining the workings of social infrastructure, Matt Nichols questions the implicit disposition of personal and institutional values. His recent work takes the idea of entropy as a departure point to consider the value of an object as its cultural or utilitarian meaning is diminished.
Subverting techniques and materials traditionally associated with craft, Betsy Odom explores displays of identity, most recently through the lens of athleticism. Her works in this show continue her engagement with the inherent relationship between the physical body and the pathos of sport, while speaking to ideas of transport and movement through space.
Aay Preston-Myint transforms disrupted objects, bodies and sites into mutating combinations of iconography, material and sensory phenomena. Structural anomalies based on discordant juxtapositions meet ambiguous/radical/meaningless intentions to form familiar-but-strange scenes.
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DANIEL BAIRD currently lives and works in Chicago, Illinois. He has exhibited work nationally and internationally in Chicago, Philadelphia, Florida and Denmark. He is currently an MFA candidate in Studio Arts at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Class of 2011 and will be presenting his thesis exhibition in April, 2011. Daniel was also co-director of Mvsevm, an artist-run experimental exhibition space in Chicago.More information about Daniel Baird can be found at danielgbaird.com
PAUL ERSCHEN was born in Aurora, Illinois and currently lives and works in Chicago. He received his MFA in Painting and Drawing at The Ohio State University. In Chicago he has exhibited in a number of group shows, recently presented a solo exhibition at The Plaines Project and has an upcoming collaborative exhibition opening at Roxaboxen Exhibitions in April, 2011. He is Assistant Professor of Visual Art and Department Chair at The University of St. Francis in Joliet, IL. He is a member of the Chicago band Mayor Daley.
MATT NICHOLS lives and works in Chicago. He received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2010 and his BFA from the University of California, Berkeley in 2003. He has exhibited work nationally in Chicago, Milwaukee, Miami and Los Angeles. More information about Matt Nichols can be found at matt-nichols.com
BETSY ODOM was born in Amory, Mississippi and currently lives and works in Chicago, IL. She received her MFA in sculpture at Yale University in 2007. She recently presented work at The Hyde Park Art Center and has an upcoming solo show at Threewalls in May, 2011. She also recently curated Bulldog at the North Branch Gallery in Skokie, IL. More information about Betsy Odom can be found at www.betsyodom.com
AAY PRESTON-MYINT is an artist, printmaker, space-maker, DJ, and educator who does collaborative programming with No Coast, Mess Hall, and Chances Dances, and edits an online journal called Monsters and Dust. He has exhibited nationally in San Francisco, Minneapolis, and New York. He has contributed original writing as well as had multiple reviews of work in publications such as the Chicago Reader, New City, Proximity, and AREA. Aay is currently an MFA candidate in Studio Arts at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Class of 2011. More information about Aay Preston-Myint can be found at www.dirtrainbow.net