Burrow // new work by Corinne Teed and Valentina Zamifrescu // curated by Anastasia Karpova Tinari

Burrow
new work by Corinne Teed and Valentina Zamifrescu
curated by Anastasia Karpova Tinari
June 3-30th

Opening reception: Saturday, June 3rd
6-9pm

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

ACRE Exhibitions is delighted to present the two-person exhibition Burrow, in which Valentina Zamifrescu and Corinne Teed use film, virtual reality, printmaking, and sculpture to create personal worlds that explore suppressed memories and forge a utopian queer ecology existence. Corinne Teed’s titular video piece The Burrows shows six diverse people curling up in and digging out large animal-like burrows in the brown soil. Working with fellow residents on ACRE’s Steuben, Wisconsin grounds, Teed filmed her subjects resting, dozing, and boring, their bodies conforming to and determining the hole’s womb like shape. Near the end, the film’s participants emerge from their burrows like small animals waking from hibernation. Teed interweaves queer, animal, and ecological dialogues to re-examine social and environmental histories. By drawing this parallel, she explores how queer and animal communities have been ostracized or isolated to serve late capitalist society.

Valentina Zamifrescu excavates and abstracts hew own suppressed memories and traumas from a childhood in Romania during Communism’s abolishment and her family’s subsequent immigration to the United States. In her Virtual Reality environment Retreat, viewers enter a digital space with snow and mountains and are free to move around and explore. Unlike other video and gaming experiences with a structured narrative and directed actions, Zamifrescu’s environment is a suspended dreamscape without any pointed direction. Viewers float within this world like distant memory; Retreat’s characters are removed, isolated, and refuse to interact. Zamifrescu’s accompanying sculptures and 2D works also cull her memories and unrecognized family experiences, exploring whether trauma can be suppressed or passed on. With artistic practices that stretch across disciplines, both Teed and Zamifrescu carve out a more inclusive, personal, and comforting space and place that is not provided or granted by social norms.

About the artists and curator:

Valentina Zamfirescu was born in Craiova, Romania in 1984 and relocated to the United States when she was 12 years old. Zamfirescu received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013 and she is currently pursuing her MFA at Yale University in the Sculpture Department. Valentina is a co-founder and co-director of 4th Ward Project Space, in Chicago, Illinois. She has shown in Chicago at institutions and galleries including Slow and the Inter-national Museum of Surgical Science.

Corinne Teed is a research-based, multimedia artist primarily working in printmaking, installation, time based media and social practice. Her research interests include queer theory, ecology, critical animal studies and settler colonialism. She has attended residencies at ACRE, Signal Fire, AS220 and Virginia Center for Creative Arts, while her work has been exhibited in the U.S. and abroad. Teed received a BA from Brown University and an MFA from University of Iowa.

Anastasia Karpova Tinari is a Chicago based art historian, curator, and writer interested in artwork that questions national identity, exposes and subverts political power structures, and broadens a prevailing art historical narrative. Anastasia is the Director of Rhona Hoffman Gallery and regular contributor to Newcity and The Seen. Prior to Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Anasta-sia was a curatorial fellow at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Coordinator of Museum and Exhibition Studies at UIC, and worked Museum Education at the National Gallery of Art, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Italy. This is her final exhibition as a 2016-2017 Curatorial Fellow at Acre Residency & Exhibitions.