Everyone knows and everyone knows that everyone knows and everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone knows and so on.

Anaïs Daly executes an adept kind of continuity drift, one in which what we know and what we are given to know at the beginning is unclear at the end. In a series of mixed media paintings she provides the substrate for formal language, with meaning grounded in symbols drawn from the history of painting. Anaïs builds upon this base with an inquisitive structure that puts those foundational symbols together in a manner that causes their meaning to begin to unravel, making it difficult for each to contain its full sense and context. Anaïs picks apart syntax by pulling together a web of fragmented representations; the body, the land, the hand, the beast, the column. What is formally familiar in these works acts to obfuscate meaning, which has been manipulated by Anaïs in the process of developing a method for using language to do more than describe the world. Under her direction description is agile and compositions comprised of many parts confront the limitations of ever becoming a whole.

Andrew Barco begins with a misunderstanding, and moves forward from the site of the error without attempting to resolve what has been misunderstood. Drawing from common knowledge and operating as an authority through the use of academic voice, Barco takes advantage of the conceptual disorder instigated by a polysemantic relationship. From this point he constructs objects in response to a world defined by an unstable history and fortified by his misinterpretation. In this instance two mechanical objects that exemplify the word drone become one—a Predator Drone and a Hurdy-gurdy. The resultant machine is a drone that drones. Barco uses the structure of a Predator drone, the design and purpose of which is remote operation that allows distance between the user and the execution of actual violence. Inside this structure is the mechanism of a Hurdy-gurdy, an instrument that requires the expertise of a present operator to make an ancient sound. This object created from his misinterpretation gives an opportunity to consider the history and application of both objects on a new scale.

Anaïs Daly is an artist, mother and teacher living and working in Chicago. She is a recent recipient of a teaching fellowship at the University of Chicago, A 7 week residency at the Banff Centre and a residency at Acre, Chicago.  Her work has or will appeared at Heaven, Chicago, IL, The Hills Esthetic Center, Chicago, IL, Banff Centre for the Arts, Banff, Canada, The Chicago Exposition 2014, The Logan Center for the Arts, Chicago, IL, Dova Temporary, Chicago, IL, Johalla Projects, Chicago, IL among other Chicago locations.  Her work has also shown nationally in multiple venues in New York, Miami, Boston, and Atlanta.

Andrew Barco is an object, installation and performance maker based in Chicago, Illinois. His work is concerned with the often strange and improbable ways ideas and habits can be transmitted across cultural landscapes and through time.   With an MFA in sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Andrew’s work uses craft and industrial histories, quirky and edgy relational gestures, and philosophical inquiry to create affective and thoughtful encounters.  His work has been featured in group exhibitions in Durham NC, Baltimore MD, Hartford, CT, and Chicago, IL, New Orleans, LA.  Solo exhibitions include: “Imminence: A Life” at Threewalls, in Chicago, IL (2014), “Oblique Negotiations” at the Fivesevendell Project Space in Boston, MA (2010) and “Passion for the Real” at West Village and “Sonnets to Orpheous” at Transom Gallery in Durham, NC (2007).

Kate Bowen is an artist, curator, and teacher living and working in Chicago. She is the Video Programming Coordinator at the Museum of Contemporary Photography and Exhibitions Director for ACRE. She is a lecturer at the Illinois Institute of Art and a Teaching Artist with Picture Me and After School Matters. She received her MFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago in 2011.

ACRE (Artists’ Cooperative Residency and Exhibitions) is a volunteer-run non-profit based in Chicago devoted to employing various systems of support for emerging artists and to creating a generative community of cultural producers. ACRE investigates and institutes models designed to help artists develop, present, and discuss their practices by providing forums for idea exchange, interdisciplinary collaboration, and experimental projects.

Document and Heaven Gallery are pleased to present Works on Floor, a group exhibition by artists Laura Letinsky, Nazafarin Lotfi and Suara Welitoff. The artworks in Works on Floor focus on themes of time, death, and the body, and its influence on sculptural and video based works. The term “Lay to rest” evokes a stoppage of that unknown time, a burying of an object, a thing eventually brought to a close. The works in the exhibition consist of handmade white porcelain urns (Letinksy), neutral paper-mache forms (Lofti) and looping black and white appropriated clips of vintage films (Welitoff). The absence of color in the exhibition heightens the sparse installation and lends itself to a fading or fleeting image that occurs over a duration. The title of the exhibition plays on the term “Works on Paper” usually referring to drawings, watercolors, prints, posters, or photographs which are generally seen as less significant works in relation to painting and sculpture. In metaphorically removing the wall and placing works on the gallery floor, can ceramic, paper, and film hold a relationship that normally is seen as very separate? The exhibition consists of six parallel 4’x8’ white wood panels laid directly on the floor of the gallery acting as blank frames for the works to lay and create minimal dioramas. The floor panels are split into two groups of three, half in the east gallery and half in the west gallery and run perpendicular to the diagonal wall that separates the two spaces. Taking works that are normally hung on a wall or propped up on a waist high pedestal and laying them to rest on the floor allows the wall works and pedestal works to lay, lean, and interact in a way that normally would be separated by the gallery space itself. Laura Letinsky (Canadian, b. 1962) received her BFA from the University of Manitoba, 1986, and her MFA from Yale University School of Art, 1991. Previous shows include the Getty Museum, Los Angeles; The Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography; Ill Form and Void Full, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Photographers Gallery, London; Laura Letinsky: Still Life, Denver Art Museum, CO; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and The Renaissance Society, Chicago. Collections include the Art Institute of Chicago; Hermes Collection, Paris, France; The Microsoft Art Collection, Seattle, WA; The AMon Carter Museum; The John Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; The Musee de Beaux-Arts, Montreal, QUE; The Museum of Fine Art, Houston, TX; and The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Letinsky is a Professor at the University of Chicago, Department of Visual Arts. Nazafarin Lotfi (Iranian, b. 1984) received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011 and her BA from the University of Tehran in 2007. Lotfi’s work has been included in exhibitions nationally and internationally, including Italy, South Korea, Hungary, Germany, and Iran. Recent exhibitions include Poiesis at Fenrwey Gallery, Chicago, IL; White Light at Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago, IL; Pattern Recognition at Ana Cristea Gallery, New York City, NY; and Not Safe for Work at DUVE Berlin, Berlin, Germany. Suara Welitoff (b. 1951, Jersey City, NY) lives and works in Cambridge, MA. Welitoff has shown work nationally at Barbara Krakow Gallery, Boston, Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, Tony Wight Gallery, Chicago, the De Cordova Sculpture Park and Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. She has shown in group shows around the world in Milan, Frankfurt, Berlin, Los Angeles, and New York. She is a recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, the Rappaport Prize, the Maud Morgan Prize and is in the Collection of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Worcester Art Museum and Deutsche Bank New York.

The Height Below
Elizabeth McCarthy, Soo Shin

“The body is our general medium for having a world.” - Maurice Merleau-Ponty
How do we move forward in the world where there is no definite answer or direction ahead? Often we have to reason and grasp at reality through the debris of our own darkness in which we cannot see our path. The exhibition The Height Below presents Chicago-based artists Liz McCarthy and Soo Shin’s recent works that explore the fear of uncertainty, and the struggle in having faith in something we cannot prove. This collection works reference body and ritual as mediums in search for small epiphanies in the unknown path ahead of them.

Liz McCarthy is an artist and arts organizer based out of Chicago. Her work combines photography, sculpture, and performance to explore our psychological framing of experience. She regularly shows work throughout the Midwest, most recently at the Comfort Station in Chicago. She has participated in residencies such as Atlantic Center for the Arts, ACRE, and High Concept Laboratories, and has been honored with fellowship support from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, Illinois Arts Council, and Chicago’s Department of Tourism.

Soo Shin was born in Seoul, Korea and currently lives and works in Chicago. She holds an MFA from the School of Art Institute of Chicago. She is interested in the uncertainty in having faith in the unknown and turns the psychological struggle into physical experience through the latency of body in her sculpture, painting, and drawing. Her work has been shown in various locations in the states as well as abroad.

New work by:
Christopher Ottinger
Bea Fremderman
Adebukola Bodunrin
Matthew Schlagbaum

In the land of thieves and ghosts

Historically, the proto-science of alchemy signified an effort to sublimate base metals into gold, distill life-extending elixirs, and divine universal solvents out of common, household items. Alchemy is a “sciencey” practice that deals in paradox, wonder, and the transmutation of the mundane into the miraculous. Similarly, artists are in the business of creating works that transcend their material origins, pose nebulous questions, and embrace the improbable.

The alchemists of the old world shrouded their work in mystery and mysticism. Alchemical texts, like some artworks, are notoriously inscrutable, often written in a language of symbols only decipherable to their authors. Alchemical artists are not explicitly invested in the practice of being obscure or secretive, but they do encourage speculation concerning the overall meaning of a particular work. Alchemical artists conjure more than they create, summoning unfamiliar apparitions from familiar materials.

Not unlike the specters in one of Etienne Gaspard Robertson’s 19th century phantasmagoria, F.W. Murnau conjured demons and magic for the screen in his 1922 film, Nosferatu. (The phrase, “In the land of thieves and ghosts,” is taken from a title card in the film and refers to the homeland of Nosferatu’s vampiric antagonist, Count Orlok). The flickering of light and shadow in Murnau’s film transports viewers from the black cube of the cinema to a land that is both wondrous and alien. IN THE LAND OF THIEVES AND GHOSTS has similar goals in mind.

Like Murnau, artists Buki Bodunrin, Bea Fremderman, Christopher Ottinger, and Matthew Schlagbaum create works that are at once familiar and strange and that elicit something ethereal from the materials they use in their artistic concoctions. Fremderman and Schlagbaum, for example, frequently make use of construction materials and kitsch artifacts, creating ghostly forms out of readymade objects and images. Bodunrin and Ottinger, conversely, deal more with the interplay of light and shadow, optics and illusion. The spirits they summon function as non-corporeal foils to Fremderman and Schlagbaum’s concretized ghosts.

A contemporary notion of alchemy—mandala-wielding metaphysicians and mystics aside—signifies an impulse towards experimentation and discovery unencumbered by the restrictions of institutionalized thinking. Likewise, the images and objects here are not designed to satisfy a particular hypothesis or prove a theory. Rather, these works represent the unexpected results that can emerge from free-form experimentation and play. Though varied in form, the mark of the alchemist is present throughout the exhibition, lurking in the shadows like the iconic and haunting silhouette of Count Orlok himself.