Gluon is pleased to present the group show, Bodies; Residual Tools and Instruments, featuring works by Laura Figa, Sarah Reynolds, and Candice Davis, artists based in San Francisco, Chicago, and Minneapolis, respectively.
Post-minimalist works present the human form through indirect means of varying degrees, a kneecap emerges from plaster, an arrangement of cranial cut-outs on a board. The ontology of these pieces is in the artists’ relationship to bodies both as an abstract subject of reference, and a literal acknowledgement of the physicality of one’s identity. The sparse installation of entirely achromatic work resets the focus of the exhibition on the viewer. At once allowing them to relate to the bodily residue present in the gallery and introspect while being surrounded by tools, instruments, and fragments.
Laura Figa’s Rest Index is the shoulder rest of a violin with index tabs referential to an encyclopedia she aptly refers to as “strophes” (the first section of an ancient Greek choral ode or of one division of it). Subtle references of handheld ergonomics continue in Sarah Reynolds’ quietly violent Grip, in the form of two iron forms cast from the negative of a clenched fist. Perhaps the most overt work in the exhibition comes from Candice Davis’ recent body of work, Targets, Weapons which recognizes the inherited trauma of families that had been brought to America as slaves. Works shown comprise a board with multiple head holes, a set of spurred bilboes, and a two-sided branding iron bearing the artist’s initials.
Bodies; Residual Tools and Instruments at Gluon Gallery, Milwaukee, WI
Laura Figa, Candice Davis, and Sarah Reynolds
August 24th, 2019 - September 14th, 2019
I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now/From up and down and still somehow
It’s cloud’s illusions I recall/ I really don’t know clouds at all
– Joni Mitchell
The cloud is an original index of difference. A figure against a groundless ground, marking the proscenium between the earth and the heavens. Apophenia, the tendency to mistakenly perceive meaning between things most often uses clouds as a way to explain the phenomena, may well be the best and most concise way to explain or talk about contemporary art.
In this exhibition, five artists tackle the cloud or at least put their efforts forward in wrestling with some of the properties possessed by clouds. Matthew Girson’s contemplative drawings from life and mind depict fugitively shaded clouds recalling Paul Celan’s poetry in the aftermath of Auschwitz. Sarah Reynolds drawings of clouds probe the problematics of depicting something that is always withdrawing, regurgitating the images so that both the ground of the image and the ground of its support push themselves towards the front. Gabriel Cohen toys with mythological imagery and new age imaginaries (both states of mind that often seek to explain or elaborate humanity’s propensity for drawing our apparatuses from the elements) to create works with pirate radio waves that pick up and distort signals through space and over distances. These sounds allow the audience to conjure connections, messages, and meanings from the hardscrabble noise of man-made media and cosmic radio waves. Will Krauland fixes shadows in volcanic ash, a material that once made up clouds of smoke from volcanic activity to fix shadows against the ground by filling them in, leaving behind a vestige of light’s absence asking to be deciphered by passersby. Ashley Gillanders’s work plays with our perception to spot the difference, if even visible, between what is real and imaginary, creating identical scenes between our material reality and a 3d rendered one. Gillanders’s photographs of curtains ask the audience to consider where the threshold of “the real” might be, or if it is something that changes shape and is perpetually on the move. To respond to Mitchel’s lyricism, the recollection of an illusion may be the best, if not the only way meanings can be made.
Both Sides Now at ADDS DONNA, Chicago, IL
Gabriel Cohen, Ashley Gillanders, Matthew Girson, Will Krauland, and Sarah Reynolds
March 8, 2019 - April 13, 2019
Curated by Gareth Kaye.
Sarah H. Reynolds and Fuyumi Murata collaborate on this second iteration of Unstable to once again explore their shared interests in mimicry, ambiguity, and shadows. The first iteration of this project took place in Hiketa, Japan. Using found objects and documentation through photography and painting, these two artists create site specific installations in an attempt to unsettle the viewer’s very idea of what an object is and how it can exist in the world. While Reynolds and Murata were working on the first iteration of this project they would walk the gardens of Japan noting how the very concept of the garden was something incredibly malleable. In one moment it can imagined as a pristine thing, but venture around the bend of a path and one is met with a verdant wilderness. Shape and form come into question as properties of an object that are by no means fixed. Unstable puts the onus of interpretation on the viewer, accounting for the inevitably variable lens through which each individual will encounter an object.
The context of Chicago presents a unique opportunity for this project to exist in a new way. Fuyumi travelled from Japan to collaborate on this site-specific installation. The methodology remains constant, each artist determined to find objects that resonate with them in some way before continuing on to the documentation and installation process.
What presents itself as an object of importance will undoubtedly be informed by both artists’ backgrounds and making practices. Their collaborative work brings together objects that articulate concepts of shape, line, form, shadow, texture, time, and scale in such a way that the final installation sheds light on the multiplicity of meanings that a given object can have should there be space enough for diverse interpretation.
Unstable: not firm or fixed, not constant, prone to change, not stable
-Adia Sykes, Curator
Comfort Station, Chicago, IL
2018
Seeing Through the Garden: Perspectives of Nature from East and West, SAIC & Tokyo University of the Arts (Geidai), Collaboration between Sarah H. Reynolds and Fuyumi Murata
Sanshu-Idustsuyashiki, Japan
2017
Body Doubles, Two-person exhibition with Holly Murkerson at Apparatus Projects
Chicago, IL
2018
School of the Art Institute of Chicago MFA Thesis Exhibition
Chicago, IL
2018
