All Positions Depend // New works by Fontaine Capel, Allison Cekala, Jory Drew, Kimi Hanauer, and Yun Ingrid Lee // Curated by Josh Rios

All Positions Depend

New works by Fontaine Capel, Allison Cekala, Jory Drew, Kimi Hanauer, and Yun Ingrid Lee

May 4th-May 25th, 2018
Opening Reception: May 4th 6-9pm
Opening Night Performance: 7:30-8:00pm

ACRE Projects
1345 W 19th St.
Chicago, IL 60608

All Allegiance (detail), Kimi Hanauer, 2017

The title of the exhibition is a fragment taken from a text by sociologist and anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, which elaborates the linkages between notions of art and the sites where art is produced and received and has larger implications regarding positionality within a field. For Bourdieu, the field is an important concept, whether it is a field of meaning (like art) or a field of power (like politics); and it is within this network that various vantage points are inhabited, where subjects are constructed and meanings assembled. To say that “…all positions depend…” suggests that they (the various vantage points and sites that make up a field) are contingent. Positions depend. Upon what? Upon each other and upon the field. Thus, they are interconnected, conditional, in need, sometimes entrenched, and sometimes provisional. As a concept for framing and understanding the world, the interdependence of positionality can refer to our place relative to the various info-technologies increasingly deployed in the soft techniques of control and identification. It can refer to how audiences are activated through embodied and performative practices of reading and readership. It can refer to our place within the juridical field as we find ourselves at odds with various legal categories and classifications, imbricated in a process of power and bureaucracy. It can refer to the positions we occupy in relation to giving and receiving, the one who gifts and the one who is gifted, with the gift itself acting as a node in a network. Or it can refer to the locations we situate ourselves as we gaze upon the landscape, how the indeterminacy and openness of geography is transformed and defined through the field of historical narrative and cartographic fiction. All Positions Depend features the work of Fontaine Capel, Allison Cekala, Jory Drew, Kimi Hanauer, and Yun Ingrid Lee.

Opening night will feature a performance lecture, On Illegibility, by Yun Ingrid Lee on identification politics in the algorithms of biometrics such as facial recognition, and what it means to be illegible to both human and machine vision. This performance is made possible in part by support from Stroom Den Haag.

Fontaine Capel is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist, curator, educator, and facilitator. She is Co-Founder and Executive Director of the alternative art space Hume Chicago. In conjunction with her studio and curatorial practice, she has worked as a teaching artist at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and Marwen. She received a B.A. at Oberlin College, and will be relocating to her hometown of New York City to pursue an MFA at Columbia University this fall.

Allison Cekala (b. 1984) is an artist currently living and working in Massachusetts. Her work, largely rooted in landscape, investigates the ways in which humans move, shape, and transform their surroundings. She is currently working on a long-form film that traces the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo River from its headwaters in southern Colorado to the Gulf of Mexico. Cekala’s work has been supported through residencies at ACRE, the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, the Cary Institute for Ecosystem Studies, and the MacDowell Colony. Cekala holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies from Tufts University and a BA from Bard College in Environmental Studies and Photography.

Jory Drew is an artist and graduate of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is concerned with how the social construction of race, class, and power manifest and determine individual realities. He works to dismantle said constructs, through the fragmentation of photography, video, sculpture, and language. Drew is a Co-founder of F4F, a domestic venue in Little Village (Chicago) and a Co-organizer of Beauty Breaks, an intergenerational beauty and wellness workshop series for black people along the spectrum of femininity.

Kimi Hanauer is an artist, writer, and cultural organizer originally from Tel Aviv and based in Baltimore. In her practice, she is dedicated to two primary goals: first, to cultivate models and methodologies that can serve as utopian alternatives to our current realities, and second, to develop networks and spaces that can translate these alternatives into concrete experiences. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is held in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Kimi is the founder and co-organizer of Press Press.

Yun Ingrid Lee is an artist, composer, and performer interested in failure, hybridity, and collective sensing. Yun’s work investigates histories and power relations in acoustic phenomena and different media technologies. Presentations of Yun’s work have included WHITE PINK BROWN at Auto Italia, London (2018), On Illegibility at Sonic Acts Academy, Amsterdam (2018), Poetics and Politics of Erasure on oneacre.online (2017), and Human Mixers on Sonic Anchor at Hong Kong Arts Centre (2015). Yun is founder of the BARTALK lecture and performance series in The Hague (2015 – present).