Opening Reception:
Sunday, August 23rd, 3-10pm
704 Highland Avenue, Oak Park, IL
www.terrainexhibitions.com
How to prepare for your attendance at the 2nd Terrain Biennial reception and block party on Sunday August 23rd.
What to bring?
Bring lawn chairs,umbrellas, sunscreen and drinks for yourselves and, because you are generous- soda, water, beer, chips and dips to share. Bring bicycles if you would like to ride around Oak Park looking at the great yard projects. Bring your friends!
What to expect?
Be prepared to hang out and relax and talk to new and exciting people while you see new and exciting art and performances.
@3-7PM A big block party with performances by Aram Han Sifuentes, Sarah Beth Woods/ Tracers, True Touch Spa/ Rachel Ellison, Fatimata Traore, Alexandria Eregbu, Holly Rae Harell, and Caleb Yono collaboratively performingYou Are Not Your with Zachary Hutchinson, Udita Upadhyaya, Valentina Vella, Maryam Taghavi, Tongyu Zhao, and Charles L. Rice.
Special appearance by Trunk Show featuring Claire Arctander and a special maypole dance complete with maypole by Tim Brown.
Bad at Sports will host a talk show project throughout the day @ Terrain
Inside the Artist Kitchen will host a pie eating/ benefit event.
@ 7 PM: The Haxan 5 with Bruce Neal, Sean DeSantis, Matt Silcock, Catie Olson and EC Brown will play followed by...
Chances Dances at 8 PM ish DJ-ing like crazy. ...
Sarah Beth Woods is a Chicago-based artist who uses the languages of craft, sculpture, and performance to explore material culture and femininity through artifice and adornment. Woods received an MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a BFA from Northern Illinois University. Her work has been included in shows at the University of Michigan's Work:Detroit space, Girls Club, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, A.I.R gallery in Brooklyn, New York, the Bob & Roberta Smith Kunstverein at Coventry University, Coventry England, and in Chicago at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Western Exhibitions, The Franklin, Hyde Park Art Center, and Woman Made Gallery. Her work has been published in Artnet.com and Newcity magazine where she was recently named one of the top 5 Subversively Conceptual Crafters in Chicago.
Aram Han Sifuentes is a social practice fiber artist and works closely with Chicago-based non-profit organizations, community centers, and public schools to facilitate workshops for immigrant communities. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally. Her solo exhibitions include “A Mend” at Hollister Gallery in Wellesley, MA, and “73,000 waiting” at Chicago Artists Coalition in Chicago, IL in October 2015. Her workshops include “Immigrant Takeover” at the Center for Craft, Creativity and Design in Ashville, NC, and “US Citizenship Test Sampler” at the Smithsonian Institution. She is a DCASE grant and Puffin Foundation Ltd grant recipient. Han earned her BA in Art and Latin American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley in 2008, and her MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013.
Website: www.aramhan.com
Alexandria Eregbu is a visual artist whose work often takes shape in the form of performance, programming, and curatorial practices. Her concerns frequently address community, materiality, performativity, and visibility of racialized and gendered bodies in space. In 2012, Eregbu was commissioned by Out of Site Chicago to perform 11/10/10, a project that confronted the physical and geographical boundaries of the city of Chicago. Eregbu's work has been featured in two solo exhibitions and several group exhibitions including Seminar (New York); Exodus at the University of Chicago's Arts Incubator in Washington Park; and Mythologies at Sullivan Galleries (Chicago). Eregbu was a recipient of the Propeller Fund Grant (2013), a 2014-2015 Resident Curator with HATCH Projects at Chicago Artists Coalition, and a Public Studio Artist in Residence at the Chicago Cultural Center. Eregbu received her BFA from the School of the Arts Institute of Chicago. She was recently highlighted in Newcity’s Breakout Artists 2015: Chicago’s Next Generation of Image Makers — and is anticipating a Curatorial Fellowship and Artist Residency with ACRE this upcoming year.
Holly Rae Harrell’s (b. 1993 New York, NY) work is a cross pollination between sculpture and performance. She likes to think of them as working symbiotically, not in opposition with one another, but instead one in the same. Sometimes her sculpture is a site for her performance, where Holly interjects herself into a space she’s created. Other times, she views sculpture as evidence of a happening, so it is performative in its gestural nature. In this way, Holly aims to investigate and dramatize the power embedded within facets of the bourgeois. Her work explores the different ways in which these facets may be performed in different registers such as the farcical, the ritualistic and the tasteless. It is important to Holly that she is never seen as critiquing the problems within these areas of interest; rather, she aims to embrace these areas and fully inhabit them. She received her BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015.
You Are Not Your is an performative estrangement of white America focused on the backyard summertime get together. Lazy leisure and repressed libidinal forces animate the performers into a processional exploration of consumption without bounds or responsibility.
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Performers:
Zachary Hutchinson (b. 1991) is a interdisciplinary artist and programmer. He recently received his BFA at from SAIC and is a MFA candidate at UIC. He has had works shown in Montreal, Mexico City, San Francisco, Berlin and extensively in Chicago. His current project VideoVideoZine.com is a monthly user submitted archive of moving image work along side interviews with young artists and curated videos selections by establish artists. www.ZacharyHutchinson.com
Udita Upadhyaya is an interdisciplinary artist from Mumbai, India. She is also a researcher of human behavior and consumption. She has worked extensively in western India to understand the evolution and rise of materialism, labor and urban migration in the rural community. She is currently obtaining a MFA in studio art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Her artistic explorations include a study of global cultures and an uncovering of personal and collective histories, both ignited by the passion to transcend cultural, social and gender binaries. The work seeks to illuminate those that are relegated to the background by examining subtle coercions that result in conformity and loss of identity.
Valentina Vella is a video and performance artist from Rome, Italy. She holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts and Media from Columbia College Chicago and she is one of the five recipients of the College Art Association fellowships for MFA students in their final year. She tried to ride a horse across America and she made a film about it, which you can watch here: https://vimeo.com/93747729
Maryam Taghavi is an Iranian-Canadian artist and curator. Her work ranges from performance to installation, video, and photography. She received her BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design and is currently an MFA candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her works have been exhibited in Canada, Iran, the United States, and Mexico.
Tongyu Zhao (b. Hubei, China) is an interdisciplinary artist currently pursuing her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with an emphasis on Performance art and Fiber and Material Studies. Her interest lies in the being as an individual human and the awareness of the environment, much like being a particle of the waves of the universe. By adapting a curious scientific way of exploration and experimentation with common and daily accessible materials, her physical body as isolated subject, Tongyu attempt to understand human beings beter, and to provoke different states of being and living. Her goal for this moment is to maintain this moment of time, as strongly and as softly, maybe simultaneously both as a waterfall and a falling post-it note.
Charles L. Rice is a Chicago based artist focusing in performance, found objects, and photography. His work is based off his personal narrative of being an orphan and creates art that confronts audiences to contemplate the emotional barriers we all face. Growing up in the suburbs of northern Chicago, Charles continued his education at Arizona State University and graduated in 2011 with a Bachelors of Fine Arts. Recently, Charles graduated from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a Masters in Fine Arts in Performance.
Caleb Yono (b. 1981 Ann Arbor MI) is an interdisciplinary artist working to mediate discursive signs and affects of identity, class, and sexuality through representations of bodies charged with queer potential and tendencies. Caleb’s installations of objects, paintings, videos, and performance generate theatrical ecologies of representation and expression; folding the illustrative and the somatic together his work evokes a range of outlier and secondary (art) Histories. He received his BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007, and his MFA in painting and drawing from The School in 2015.
