Thru the Roof
Opens on March 10th and runs through April 14th, 2018.
"Thru the Roof" is a visual meditation on exit strategies: leaving, staying, and the affective places between and beyond. In examining tactics for departure, we may tangentially ask, what are ideas and objects that point us toward home? How does our future thinking prepare us to survive in the present?
Exhibition essay by Ximena Keogh Serrano
Curated by Dan Paz
Opening reception:
Saturday, March 10th, 2018
5-8pm
Opening performance:
"Kimilsungia" by Bo Choi in collaboration with Regina Mamou
6:00pm/ 6:30pm/ 7:00pm/ 7:30pm
*to make a non-Saturday appointment contact: [email protected]
*The Hamilton Bldg is not wheelchair accessible, please be in touch for accommodations.
*Exhibits run for 6 weeks
*Georgetown Art Attacks on the 2nd Saturday of every month.
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David Cordero is an artist, designer, and educator based in Chicago, IL. In 2016 he launched SOUTH, a multi-discipline design studio. His work has been featured in Hunter and Cook, The Chicago Tribune and The Art Newspaper. David was a teaching fellow at the University of Chicago, where he received his MFA in 2010. He received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007.
Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez works with photography, video and multiscreen installation to examine the slippage between time and the act of image creation. His work examines the ambiguities of language and what is gained or lost in the translation from image to text. His most recent work has been presented in exhibitions at The Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Vox Populi, Philadelphia; MAMA Gallery, Los Angeles; and a solo exhibition at the Windor Contemporáneo in Madrid. He has participated in residencies at ACRE, Vermont Studio Center and attended the Program for Advanced Studies in Critical Practices at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia. He has studied at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and received a B.F.A from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and an M.F.A from the University of Pennsylvania.
Kirsten Leenaars is an experimental documentary maker and engages with individuals and communities to create participatory video and performance work. Her work oscillates between fiction and documentation, reinterprets personal stories and reimagines everyday realities through staging, improvisation, and iteration. Leenaars examines the nature of our constructed realities-the stories we tell ourselves and the stories we identify with-and explores the way we relate to others. In her work, she aims to bring to light a shared humanity, often through humor and play. Recent projects include (Re)Housing the American Dream - a multi-year performative documentary project with American born and refugee youth commissioned by the Haggerty Museum of Art in Milwaukee, and Notes on Empty Chairs, a series of three performances about loss, community, and empathy, produced for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago in response to the work of Doris Salcedo. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, at venues including the Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City; the District of Columbia Arts Center, Washington DC; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Glass Curtain Gallery, Threewalls, Gallery 400, and 6018North, Chicago; Elaine L. Jacob Gallery, Detroit; Printed Matter, Inc., New York; the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus; the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam; and Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin. Leenaars has received multiple grants from the Any Warhol Foundation; The Mondrian Fund; cultural support grants from the Dutch Consulate in New York, Milwaukee Art Board Production Grant. Leenaars has been nominated for the 3Arts Award, multiple times and most recently was nominated for the USA Fellowship and was selected as one of four RAD Lab Fellows by Chicago based arts organization Threewalls. She currently is an Associate Professor in the Department of Contemporary Practices and the Performance Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Regina Mamou (b. 1983, Southfield, Michigan) is a Los Angeles based artist. She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, and was a Fulbright fellow to Jordan. Mamou grew up with the awareness of the implications of political ideology intertwined with religion. Mamou's mother, who is Polish-American, and Mamou's father, who is a Christian-Chaldean
from Iraq, raised her multiculturally. As a former priest, Mamou's father left the clergy, and Iraq, for fear of persecution. This need to understand ideologies has been the focus of her work since she started investigating utopias throughout the US. Mamou's travels have allowed her to not only examine the implications of social utopias but also the struggle to create community through a dystopian future.
DeeDee is a pop-up shop, pop-up karaoke bar and docu-drama created in response to Portland’s developing landscape. DeeDee is a collaborative project of Portland-based artists Lu Yim , Maggie Heath, and Allie Hankins. Clothing Construction/Design by Heen Chiu and Emily Wobb. DeeDee first premiered as a fictional pop-up shop entitled Total Sell Out! in Portland, OR in November 2017 and ended as a pop-up party at a closed-down bar then resurrected by DeeDee.
Bo Choi is a fashion designer and innovative artist. With a primary focus in new media art and fashion design, she envisions clothes as both rendering explicit their capacity to represent the self, as well as building upon, and breaking with, past conventions in order to allow an endless refashioning of the self disallowed by the limited vocabulary of much art and fashion today. For last ten or more years, she has been known as a visual artist, a computer graphic artist and a fashion designer and has been invited to numerous shows around the world include artist residency Kulturprojekte, Berlin Germany, Hambridge Center, GA, and NMAR Seoul, South Korea. She completed her MFA 2009 in Fiber at School of art in University of Washington, Seattle, WA. Currently, she represented by Gallery IMA in Seattle teaches graphic design & digital art at North Seattle College and Edmond Community College.
Writer in residence:
Erin L. McCoy holds an MFA in Poetry and an MA in Hispanic Studies from the University of Washington. Her poem, "Futures," was selected by Natalie Diaz for inclusion in Best New Poets 2017. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Bennington Review, Pleiades, DIAGRAM, Cimarron Review, and other publications. She is Community Outreach Coordinator and Public Relations Manager for Open Books, Seattle's poetry-only bookstore, and has received a Fulbright Fellowship and the Oakley Hall III Memorial Scholarship to attend the Community of Writers in Sq. Valley, California, among other awards. She is from Louisville, Kentucky.
Oldham County, a poem written in response to themes from Thru the Roof
Photo above: Progreso, by Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez, White Neon, 36in(w) x 3in(h), Edition 1 of 1, 2017.