CHICAGO, IL (AAPNW) Opening Friday, January 20, 2023, “Pawing the Ground in Place” is an exhibition that will feature new work by Heather Kai Smith and Ali Feser at the Logan Center Gallery in the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts.
Both artists use drawing, projection and installation to consider representations of utopian fantasy and longing. They play with material transpositions of photography and through simultaneous modes of figuration and abstraction by questioning the associative possibilities in collecting and revisiting images.
The exhibit will be further activated and annotated with performances by a wider group of collaborators, including C. Tai Tai and Whitney Johnson (Matchess) during opening night.
For more information, email: logancenterexhibitions@uchicago.edu or call 773.834.8377.
About
Heather Kai Smith is a visual artist and educator from Calgary, Canada. Rooted in drawing, her practice explores the communicative potential of the medium. Referencing images of collective engagement, histories of communal living strategies and organized dissent, the works employ pictorial observation and iteration. Her practice has lent itself to projects in animation, printmaking and installation with an emphasis on collaboration.
Ali Feser is a cultural anthropologist and interdisciplinary artist from upstate New York. Her work figures the chemical processes of photography, manufacturing, image formation, developing, and decay as a metonymic language to theorize industrial capitalism and its capacity to transform our senses, our subjectivity, and the material constitution of the earth itself. Across text, installation, image, and performance, she proposes that film is the molecular “cell-form” of industrial capital, endlessly reiterated through new modes of extraction and forms of desire.