![Terrain presents Five by Five by Melissa Potter and Mat Rappaport.
June 2 – June 14 Opening event: 7:00 − 9:00 PM Yes, it’s an evening event!
In 2003, before they knew one another, artists Melissa Potter and Mat Rappaport were in Belgrade, Serbia. Each was pursuing a body of work, and was deeply affected by the place. Using this confluence as a departure point for their project at Terrain they explore a place through what might be shared, or divergent, impressions. The installation also celebrates Chicago as the city home to the largest Serbian diaspora and official sister city to Belgrade.
The title Five by Five is inspired by an old radio communications expression meaning “loud and clear”. This project revisits the artists’ engagement with Belgrade through personal archives and impressions, and an engagement with three Belgrade-based artists and curators. Each of the five collaborators have contributed five images or videos reflecting on the cultural context of Belgrade circa 2003 and 2012. Skype or phone interviews with each artist/curator will create virtual captions for their selections, bridging the “there” and “here”. The collected materials are remixed and presented as a video and audio installation on the front porch of Terrain. http://melissapotter.com/
Melissa Potter is a multi-media artist who has exhibited at venues including White Columns in NYC, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY through the Artist in the Marketplace program, the VideoDumbo Festival, and Galerija Zvono in Belgrade, Serbia in addition to exhibitions in universities and galleries internationally. She is a two-time Fulbright recipient to Belgrade, Serbia and has been the recipient of other awards and residencies in Serbia and Bosnia, including ArtsLink and the Trust for Mutual Understanding. Her critical essays on art have been printed in BOMB, Art Papers, Chicago Art Magazine, Flash Art, Metropolis M, Proximity Magazine, Hand Papermaking, and AfterImage. Melissa Potter is Assistant Professor in the Interdisciplinary Art Department of Columbia College Chicago.
Mat Rappaport’s art work has been exhibited in the United States and internationally in galleries, film festivals and public spaces including the former Yugoslavia. His current work utilizes mobile video, performance and photography to explore habitation, perception and power as related to built environments. Rappaport is a co-initiator of V1B3 [www.v1b3.com], which seeks to shape the experience of urban environments through media based interventions. He has received fellowships from the Howard Foundation, the Mary L. Nohl Fund, the Montgomery County Ohio Cultural District, and University of Wisconsin Milwaukee’s Center for 21st Century Studies. Rappaport received his MFA from the University of Notre Dame. Rappaport is an Associate Professor at Columbia College in Chicago where he coordinates the Motion Graphics curriculum shared by the Television Department and the Department of Film and Video. http://www.meme01.com/?page_id=520](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3orxzL9Zu1r44lzbo1_1280.jpg)
Only twelve more days to drive by and see Holly Holmes’ “Transcription” and then a site specific piece by Claire Ashley fills Terrain
The next exhibition is a site specific piece by Claire Ashley http://www.claireashley.com
called
“limes and bricks suck pink you tasteless hunk”
My work inhabits the liminal space between painting, sculpture, and performance. I mine the language of abstraction, minimalism, and pop while transforming mundane industrial materials, such as tapes and tarps, into drawings, sculptures and performative props.
I am interested in the assumptions and history of painting. I create objects that engage in intellectual play, testing the boundaries and expectations of modernist painting, while exploring the possibilities of low-brow, mundane, unconventional painting materials. I am interested in how objects “look” as opposed to “how” they are created i.e. the appearance of abstract painting visualized through industrial materials and sculptural form. I combine expressive painting in opposition to the linearity and the rigidity of adhesive tapes and vinyls.
I have explored many approaches to object making to get at my desire for this conglomeration of painting and sculpture. In so doing, my work with inflatable sculptures has been the most satisfying. I find the inflatable form compelling, as it exists in two states: both as flaccid skin (painting) and taught volume (sculpture). I think of the polarities of form within these objects as metaphors for the fragility and strength of our bodies: breathing - inhale/exhale; aging – taught/wrinkled skin; posturing - body signals as signs of strength/ weakness; and sexuality - flaccid/erect organs. In addition I am interested in how the body can activate the inflatable sculpture (performance), and how the ‘prop’ abstracts and extends the body holding it. I think of the scale and weight of the object when carried as a reference to a turtle carrying it’s home or to Atlas carrying the world: a metaphor for the responsibilities we bear. So labor, ritual, endurance, and humor are also important components in my work.
I have always been interested in the physicality of surface, the material voice of an object, and the pattern, structure, and metaphor of the grid. My early work included paintings of large tartan-like grid patterns: a response to my Scottish heritage, and Rauschenberg inspired ‘combine’ paintings: early attempts to bridge painting and sculpture. But when I had kids, the early grid acquired meaning in reference to forms of familial containment, protection, and nurture.
My work over the past ten years has evolved out of an examination of domestic objects of comfort and play. This impetus has led me to explore forms that include: my home, pillows, mattresses, bodies, airbags, and playful bouncy castles as symbols of comfort, protection (over-protection) and playful energy. My recent work has used silhouette shapes from architectural fragments of my home as a starting point from which an inflatable form is stitched. These architectural fragments once inflated become figurative: a reference to the people who dwell inside them and the thing that makes a house a home.
