Events

View times

Susan Abelson, Skip Arnold, Nayland Blake, Adam Brooks, Gary Cannone, Meg Cranston, DeFlux Collective, Guerrilla Girls, Perry Hoberman, Charles LaBelle, Liz Lamer, Curtis Mitchell, Ben Pranger, Allan Wexler, and more

Influx, a group exhibition of works by more than forty artists, is on display as part of Fluxus Festival Chicago 1993. The exhibition presents installations, objects, books, mail art, film, video, and audience participatory projects by contemporary artists whose work demonstrates a Fluxus sensibility.

The Fluxus movement left a legacy that is felt by many artists working today, but unlike Fluxus artists of the ’60s and ’70s, the artists in this show share neither movement nor manifesto. Rather, the commonality of the artists presented in Influx is the result of a shared sensibility akin to that of the original Fluxus artists. The manifestation of both groups’ sensibilities can be found in the political edge of the work, its wit and humor, a connection between art and everyday life, a use of the aleatoric, ephemerality, and a take-it-or-leave-it attitude. Both share a playful consideration of serious issues and challenge the boundaries of art, working to expose the hierarchical structures of art classification. In addition, both generations bait their audiences into acknowledging a generalized cynicism toward the arts.

Some of the artists in the exhibition include Susan Abelson, Skip Arnold, Nayland Blake, Adam Brooks, Gary Cannone, Meg Cranston, DeFlux Collective, Guerrilla Girls, Perry Hoberman, Charles LaBelle, Liz Lamer, Curtis Mitchell, Ben Pranger, and Allan Wexler.

In conjunction with the exhibition, Hannah B. Higgins presents a public lecture at Gallery 400 on the influence of the Fluxus movement, with a follow-up context talk by Randy Alexander on works in the exhibition. An evening of performances and audience participatory events titled Automat, produced in conjunction with WhiteWalls and N.A.M.E., also accompanies the show, along with a program of music, video, and film works shown in the gallery itself. As part of Fluxus Festival Chicago, other related exhibitions are also taking place around the city.

CURATOR BIOGRAPHIES

Karen Indeck has been the Curator and Director of Gallery 400 and the Visiting Artists-In-Residence Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago since 1986. Shows that she has previously curated include NATURE/nature (1990), The Billboard Project (1992), Laughing Matters (1993). Indeck received a BFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Artist Sara Hartland-Rowe was born in 1958 in Uganda. She is well known for her pictorial investigations of the human condition in broad allegorical narrative paintings and drawings, and her experimentations with alternative forms to the rectilinear canvas such as large scale site-specific wall paintings, multipanel installations, and “sewn” drawings. Her art summons the ghosts of history to structure and bolster our artistic experience by telling stories; sometimes well known, sometimes not, accessible through the here and now. Hartland-Rowe studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston between 1986 and 1987. In 1990 she received a BFA at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax. In 1993 she received an MFA at the University of Illinois in Chicago.