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threewalls announces:
Kelly Kaczynski: The Stagehand’s
Unseen (main space)
Kirsten Leenaars: The Impossible Voyage (Larry and Jacob Kart) (project
room)
Opening Reception:
September 10, 2010, 6:00
PM
Special preview party and screening:
September 9, 2010 7:00-10:00 PM
Live music by Bill MacKay and Conrad
Freiburg
Artist Talk with Kelly Kaczynski:
September 30, 2010, 6:00
PM
On View until October 23, 2010.
photo credit: Kelly
Kaczynski
CHICAGO: threewalls presents Kelly Kaczynski’s
The Stagehand’s Unseen, an installment of her
ongoing project, the conceptual play, Olympus Manger and Kirsten
Leenaar’s The Impossible Voyage (Larry and Jacob Kart) (in the
project
room).
Kaczynski’s The Stagehand’s Unseen presents a synopsis
of a play in its objects and documents. situated between a collection and a
tableaux with the potential to historicize the play’s origins. Handled as
props in stasis, the objects of Olympus Manger are simultaneously
sculpture and artifact – leaving the role of ‘artist’ latent:
progenitor or activator,
either/and.
Producing objects and peripheral activities (photographs, video, drawing),
alongside her large scale installations, Kaczynski creates sculptural work that
both carries embedded meaning and relationship to its origins while making
available the transfer and reinterpretation of this meaning through the
implication of an audience in handling and deploying those works. Olympus
Manger uses the device of theater as its platform to examine landscape
(image and function), built environment and psycho-social relationships by
requiring an audience to choose between the role of ‘audience’ or
‘actor’ according to the placement of their body in relationship to
the stage and their participation in the completion of the narrative. For the
scenes from Olympus
Manger
, the audience was invited to move between audience and actor in
‘producing’ the work of art that was the
play.
In The Stagehand’s Unseen, the objects take the place of the
actors, laying out the materials of the play as landscape. Handling these
objects as such also proposes narrative as topography, open to the wanderings of
the individual. Positioned on a stage built to the perimeter of
threewalls’ main gallery, the landscape of objects create desire through
their stasis and limited accessibility, as the props remain just on the verge of
being re-deployed yet on
pause.
photo credit: Kirsten
Leenaars
Driven by an endless fascination for people, Kirsten Leenaars is a collector
of personal stories. Fascinated by the idea of the self as something constructed
out of the narratives we create about our lives, Leenaars sees the self as a
perpetually rewritten story whereby we become the narrative we tell about
ourselves. Using those stories she encounters by friends and acquaintances,
Leenaars rewrites them into imaginary micro-dramas about intimate relationships
and subjective
space.
By creating her own, new narrative structures from borrowed material,
Leenaars aims to question the viewer’s own ‘self making’
narrative. In this way, Leenaars creates ‘platforms’ for other
people to perform themselves. With imagination giving shape to the way we relate
to each other and the way we relate to the world we live in, Leenaars strips
down her narratives to the most bare of stages and scenes, creating an emotional
set familiar enough to an audience to allow for their entry and potential
absorption.
The Impossible Voyage (Larry and Jacob Kart) was filmed in Ohio
during the thematic “Survival” session hosted at Harold Arts in
conjunction with threewalls. With issues of community, family and genealogy
rising to the fore over the course of the 11 day residency, Leenaars honed in a
relationship between father and
son.
Leenaars will say her work finds its origin in her love for people. This is
not ‘love’ in the merely personal sense, but rather love as a state
of being. This love takes the form of a state of awareness of private fears and
longings in a world full of projections - the projection of ideals and fears we
guard, keep and identify with. This love is a way of looking: about being aware
of the filters we look through when we look at
others.
Kirsten Leenaars was born and educated in the Netherlands where she received her
BFA in Sculpture and her MA degree with a focus on socially engaged art. She
received her MFA degree in Studio Arts from UIC (Chicago) in 2007. In 2004 and
2007 she received a ‘Start Stipendium’, a stipend for
‘promising’ Dutch artists by Fonds BKVB, foundation for the visual
arts. Her work is shown at film and video festivals nationally and
internationally, in gallery context and has been part of community-based
projects. She showed among others with Slow, Chicago; Gallery Stephan Stucki,
Zurich; Poetry International Festival, Rotterdam: HotelMariaKapel, Hoorn;
Traveling Tehran Biennale, Istanbul; Contemporary Art Workshop, Chicago; LOOP
Festival, Barcelona; Gallery 400, Chicago. She has collaborated the past year
with Dan Peterman and is currently involved with DePaul University
College of Law (Chicago) to produce a work for the Iraq History Project. In
addition to her art practice Leenaars is the co-executive director of GeoAIR, a
residency program in Tbilisi, Georgia. She currently teaches at Contemporary
Practices at the School of the Art Institute in
Chicago.
Kelly Kaczynski is a sculptor and installation artist. She received an MFA from
Bard College, NY and BA from The Evergreen State College, WA. She has exhibited
with Hyde Park Art Center, IL, Rowland Contemporary, IL, University at Buffalo
Art Gallery, NY, Triple Candie, NY, Islip Art Museum, NY, Cristinerose / Josee
Bienvenu Gallery, NY, DeCordova Museum, MA, Boston Center for the Arts, MA.
Public installations include projects with the Main Line Art Center, Haverford,
PA, the Interfaith Center, NY, Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston and the
Boston National Historic Parks, MA, Boston Public Library, MA. Kaczynski
currently teaches as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art Theory and
Practice at Northwestern University, IL. Scene from ‘Olympus
Manager’ was exhibited at the University of Buffalo Art Gallery, NY in
2006 and ‘Olympus Manger’ Scene II at
Hyde Park Art Center, IL,
2008.
http://kellykaczynski.com/
http://www.kirstenleenaars.nl/
threewalls is a nonprofit 501(c)3 organization dedicated to increasing
Chicago’s cultural capital by cultivating contemporary art practice and
discourse, and by creating a locus of exchange between local, national and
international contemporary art communities through a range of programs: www.three-walls.org.
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