“What is inside is also outside”

– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

 

The subject-object relationship has been redefined to where the subject no longer has a static physiognomy. Instead the subject and object become essentially identified within the act of experiencing the artwork. Naama Hadany, Jeff Kolar and Daniel Luedtke’s works continue to explore these ideas and come to inhabit quotidian space and precarious objects referencing life’s spatial dichotomy: interior and exterior. Happening simultaneously, these two realms look at each other in an attempt to reconcile the private and public, personhood and persona, domestic hedonism and a stratified society. Hadany, Kolar and Luedtke evoke both, the inner and outer workings of these political spaces, and position their works to bind them and as continuous objects. The artworks in this project create a “hinged space”, where they articulate the fictional difference between the private and public.      

 

Taking this schism into consideration, Naama Hadany’s Topography makes the sensible (usually thought of as the inside) into form (conceived as the outside). By joining the two found/ready-made elements: flints and a tablecloth, Hadany merges different situations into one. The flints—taken from the Israeli desert—together with the tablecloth create a gentle relief of multiple surfaces: the flints aligned with the surface of the tablecloth; the tablecloth design and the contact with the earth; holding itself into the soil like a tent would do. Each of these elements represent different surfaces: the outside and the inside, the domestic space and nature. However, the way the work is composed makes these binary separations disappear, creating an interdependence between them. Jeff Kolar’s Doorbell is a custom wireless doorbell system installed at the front door of Terrain Exhibitions. Doorbell includes a set of twelve original sound compositions, each 20 seconds in duration, that are designed to loop continuously when visitors ring the doorbell. Doorbell was originally produced for the Museum as Instrument residency curated by Shannon Stratton and Joe Jeffers at Elsewhere Museum (Greensboro, NC) in June 2015. Daniel Luedtke’s Stage Drop seeks to unveil the fragility and uncertainty of private spaces. In flooding the piece with the color green, Luedtke’s work nearly blends with the existing house color staging the work as a prop, sculpture or drawing. Luedtke takes found images depicting private environments to reveal a level of trickery, a facade that is as fragile as it is captivating. The scene argues that without inhabitants, there is no private indoor space but a stage of props, idealized matter filling space free of subject-object relationships.  

 

 

 

 

Artists Bios:

 

Naama Hadany (b.1983) works in sculpture, installation and drawing. Her practice examines the affinities and dissonances between man-made commodities and organic forms through a sculptural investigation based in material transformation. Employing mimicry, imitation and camouflage she creates amalgamations of synthetic and natural materials to create a disruption between an object’s interiority and its surface. Hadany is a graduate of the MFA sculpture program at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the recipient of SAIC 2013-15 New Artist Society Scholarship Award, the Edward L. Ryerson Fellowship and the America-Israel Cultural Foundation award. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and in Red Line in Israel. She will be part of a two-person exhibition at The White Page gallery in Minneapolis in the spring of 2016.

 

Jeff Kolar is a sound artist, radio producer, and curator. He is the founder and artistic director of Radius, an experimental radio broadcast platform established in 2010. His work, which has been described as “speaker-shredding” (Half Letter Press), “wonderfully strange” (John Corbett), and “characteristically curious” (Marc Weidenbaum), activates sound in unconventional, temporary, and ephemeral ways using appropriation and remix as a critical practice. His solo and collaborative projects, installations, and public performances often investigate the mundane sonic nuances of everyday electronic devices. He has performed and exhibited widely across the United States and at international venues and festivals such as New Museum (NYC, US), The Kitchen (NYC, US), Moogfest (Durham, US), CTM Festival for Adventurous Music (Berlin, DE), Kino Šiška (Ljubljana, SL), Le Cube Centre de création numérique (Paris, FR), ORF RadioKulturhaus (Vienna, AT), LAK Festival of Nordic Sound Art (København, Denmark), among others.

 

Daniel Luedtke lives, labors and loves in Chicago and makes art between several mediums such as drawing, painting, sculpture, video and music. He received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute in 2013 and has exhibited work nationally and internationally in spaces such the Walker Art Center - Minneapolis, Museum of Contemporary Art - Chicago, the Tom of Finland Foundation - Los Angeles, Museum of Art and Design - New York and NP3 Gallery - Netherlands.

 

 

 

Curators Bios:

 

Ionit Behar is an art historian, curator and critic. She is a Ph.D. student in Art History at the University of Illinois at Chicago and her dissertation is a comparative study on minimalist art in the 1960s in Argentina and the United States. She is a curatorial graduate assistant at Gallery 400. She holds a Master's degree in Art History, Theory and Criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a Bachelor of Art Theory from Tel Aviv University, and a degree in Art Administration from the Bank Boston Foundation in Montevideo. She recently co-curated a group exhibition Twin Rooms at Julius Caesar and curated an online exhibition ¿Mañana será asi? with 25 Uruguayan artists. She served as a curatorial assistant at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago of the 2012 MFA Show and the 2013 Design Show, and co-curated with Julian Myers and Joanna Szupinska at Julius Caesar. She has held curatorial internships at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; No Longer Empty, NYC and Israel Museum, Jerusalem. She writes for La Pupila, Chicago Reader and ArtSlant. Her interests are focused on abstraction, 20th century Latin American art, the history of exhibitions, theories of space and place, and curatorial practice.

 

Sharmyn Cruz Rivera is a Puerto Rican curator based in Chicago. Her curatorial endeavors and research revolve around sound art, video, contemporary dance, performance art, and human geography. She started as an independent curator and art writer for The Fractal, a multidirectional project focused on cultural commentary and art criticism. She holds a MA in Arts Administration and Policy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a dual BA in Art History and Modern Languages from the University of Puerto Rico. She was a curatorial fellow for the SAIC MFA Show in 2012 and a 2013 summer participant at Never The Same at University of Chicago, a project that documents Chicago’s history of socially engaged art. Sharmyn is currently a program assistant at LAMPO, an organization that promotes and supports artists working in electronic and electroacoustic music, free improvisation, sound art and other new forms. She is also a 2015-2016 HATCH Curatorial Resident at the Chicago Artists Coalition mentoring six artists and curating three exhibitions with accompanying programing. Recent projects include INSIDE VOICE: a sound art program at Threewalls and Home Channels at [Open House] as part of Platforms: 10 years of Chances Dances.