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CHICAGO: As someone deeply curious about the way our world works – from the simple clarity of infinitesimally small micro reactions to the infinite complexity of macro interactions – Marissa Lee Benedict’s practice is deeply rooted in research and experimentation. Growing out of a four year investigation into algae - and its potential to transform our food, pharmaceutical, science, and fuel industries - MULTIPLICES is an exploration by Benedict into processes of thinking, making, researching, assembling, transforming: processes of making dis/connections.
For MULTIPLICES, Benedict has collected algal samples from 5 sets of sites in the Chicago metropolitan area, taking these sites as a series of coordinates from which to draw spiraling connections between personal, social, material and theoretical histories. Installed in threewalls’ main space, MULTIPLICES
pairs written text with sculptural objects; assemblages which put forward the experience of the exhibition as a multiplex, as a way in which messages and transmissions can be packaged together and sent simultaneously along a single telephone line. Building upon Deleuze and Guattari’s proposition of the book as a space where “...there are lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification”, Benedict encircles the gallery space with a single shelf – a ledge prepared to hold a multitude of “textbooks” which serve as a road maps for the sculptural assemblages occupying the gallery walls and floors.
In (At Night, I Think Of You), Aay Preston-Myint
presents a series of artworks that live double lives and investigate the place of yearning in between. The show contains objects existing both as themselves but also as parodies or replicas of those things a gay pride flag that is also a sculpture of a gay pride flag (which is also a statement of utopian desire), sculpture of a cake that is also a cake sculpture (which is also a meditation on companionship), wallpaper that is also a drawing of wallpaper (which is also a drawing of a mirror that, of course, fails to reflect, but suggests a space for self reflection). This back and forth between representation and embodiment suggests Preston-Myint's desire for these works to stake a claim in the middle ground between “identity art” and formal abstraction; that is, the artist is aware of what they are, but he is also open to the investigation of their basic materials
and essences. They are uncanny and familiar entries in the documentation of a personal/political moment, or collection of moments, in (a) queer life.
More Information
on Marissa Lee Benedict
on Aay Preston-Myint
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Images: Marissa Lee Benedict, Wolf Lake, 1938 and 1972 (top), Aay Preston-Myint (bottom)
courtesy the artists
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threewalls is a 501c3 organization providing resources to contemporary artists living and working in Cook County and region through exhibitions, grants, residencies and commissions. We are partially supported by grants and partially supported by you, our audience. Please consider donating today.
threewalls is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency; by a CityArts Program I grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs; The Chicago Community Trust; The Cliff Dwellers Foundation for the Arts; ArtsWork Fund for Organizational Development; The Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation; The Alphawood Foundation; The MacArthur Fund for Arts & Culture at the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation; John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s International Connection Fund; 3Arts Chicago; and major support is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
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