Search results for ""depaul university art museum""

Idol Structures accompanies an exhibition at the DePaul Art Museum of recent photographs and sculptures by Chicago-based artist Matt Siber, whose work explores the systems of corporate and mass-media communication that permeate the urban landscape. Instead of focusing on the information itself, Siber emphasizes the physical infrastructure of these systems. Photographs of the narrow edges of signs, sculptures of billboard ads hanging so loosely that their text is obscured in the folds, and other unique treatments of promotional materials distort and subvert the intended messages. The artist's deconstruction of such commercial efforts reveals an element of communication meant to remain invisible and subservient to image, text, and graphics. By highlighting the everyday objects used to persuade and influence, Siber's art undermines these communication systems' ability to do precisely what they were intended to do.

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Led by artists Lauren Bon, Richard Nielsen, and Tristan Duke, the Optics Division of the Metabolic Studio is a team devoted to exploring and expanding the photographic medium. Working with the Liminal Camera, a massive, portable camera obscura fashioned from a shipping container, the Optics Division uses experimental technology in an ongoing effort to map and depict the American landscape. From the arid West to New York's waterways, the camera has captured dramatic scenes of regions in transition. As part of this project, The Liminal Camera presents newly commissioned photographs made in and around Chicago. Though enormous in size, the camera, transported on a semi-trailer truck, was unobtrusive from an outsider's perspective, allowing the artists to work without drawing attention. Photographs could be developed from within the shipping container, blending the image's subject with the process of photography itself. The resulting large-scale prints not only highlight the evolving history of photographic imaging, but also locate the city within a complex global network of transportation systems, industry, and commerce.

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Countering conventional accounts of art history, which have often overlooked the artistic contributions of women of color, the exhibition “Out of Easy Reach” presents the work of twenty-four US-based, female-identifying artists from the black and Latina diasporas. The exhibition proposes myriad ways that artists are employing abstraction as a tool to explore histories both personal and universal, with focuses on mapping, migration, archives, landscape, vernacular culture, language, and the body. This catalog—which accompanies an exhibition opening in April 2018 at the DePaul Art Museum, Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Stony Island Arts Bank—includes full-color plates of the works on view; commissioned essays by exhibition curator Allison Glenn, and Cameron Shaw, executive director and founding editor of Pelican Bomb; and short-form contributions about each artist featured in the exhibition written by invited scholars, curators, writers, and artists.

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Some Kind of Duty features all new handmade weavings by Chicago-based artist Karolina Gnatowski, known as kg. In monumental and small-scale tapestries, kg, anAmerican artist who was born in Poland incorporates references ranging from Polish immigration, badminton, Jim Morrison, and feminist fiber artists to addiction, mourning, and their pet. The artist’s keen attention to the details of life’s coincidences and moments of intersection finds a fitting form in their reverence for the history of tapestry weaving, and the evidence of everyday life incorporated into the artist’s work makes their weavings an offering to those both living and dead. This catalog accompanies an exhibition at the DePaul Art Museum, and it features full-color plates of the works on view, an interview between the artist and DPAM Director and Chief Curator Julie Rodrigues Widholm, an essay by K. L. H. Wells, assistant professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, and poems written by the artist to accompany each work.

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