6/23-7/20: RUNNING ROOM // new work by Madeleine Bailey, Adam Farcus, Erik Peterson and Alexander Stewart

RUNNING ROOM
new work by
Madeleine Bailey, Adam Farcus, Erik Peterson and Alexander Stewart
June 23 – July 20, 2011

Opening Reception: Thursday, June 23, 5-8
Open Hours: Tue-Sat 11-5, Thurs 11-8

A + D Gallery at Columbia College
619 S Wabash Ave
Perhaps it is time to recapture a sense of the political situatedness of both autonomy and its transgression, a sense of the historical dialectic of disciplinary and its contestation – to attempt again ‘to provide culture with running-room’
-Hal Foster, Design and Crime, 2002.

Madeleine Bailey, Adam Farcus, Erik Peterson and Alexander Stewart met at ACRE’s 2010 session in an environment that fostered artistic experimentation, dialogue, and play. Here, the artists draw on a continuation of that energy in the form of an interdisciplinary experiment existing within and beyond its walls. Over the course of this show, the artists will transform the gallery space at A + D Gallery into a Running Room.

RUNNING ROOM is based on Karl Kraus’s notion of allowing an idea / place / material / object enough wiggle room to change. Encouraging an active détournement of seemingly banal signs, we allow a space for viewers to experience the darkly humorous undercurrents that make up everyday life. If allowed “running-room,” a sculpture can become a prop for a performance, a film can be transformed by its very viewing, and an artwork can be built by its audience. Slowly populated by work over the duration of the show, the exhibition’s room is not only defined through Kraus but also by the exhibition space itself – its four walls, floor and ceiling- outside and in. We use the gallery as both a physical space for social interaction and a conceptual space for redefining the purpose of the exhibition. By way of four curated events that will take place each Thursday evening and the large (and changeable) amphitheater, we invite the possibility to turn an exhibition into this: a stadium, a staging ground, a public forum, and a theater.

This exhibition is sponsored by the Art + Design Department at Columbia College Chicago and partially supported by an Illinois Arts Council Grant, a state agency.

Throughout the course of this exhibition, there will be four subsequent openings for each individual artist.

Erik Peterson
Public Arena: Two Tow’n and What the Large Glass Company Carries (Remains to be Seen)
Thursday, June 23
5-8pm

Adam Farcus
Audience Participation Forum: Feed Forms and Duck It
Thursday, June 30
5-8pm

Alexander Stewart
Slapstick Hat-trick: A program of short films
Thursday, July 7
5-8pm

Madeleine Bailey
Impalpable / Transportable (closing reception)
Thursday, July 14
5-8pm