Keeley Haftner: limitless future, limited reflection

Saturday, Apr 15 – May 27, 2017 5 – 8 pm

1709 W. Chicago Ave.
Chicago, IL 60622

Paris London Hong Kong is pleased to present limitless future, limited reflection, Keeley Haftner’s first solo exhibition at the gallery.

With this installation, Haftner explores her own intense yearning toward non-living matter through processes of transformation. Glass shards can become precious stones; car bumpers can be carbon fruit. But every state change is accompanied by energy expenditure. Haftner uses a famous work lost to twentieth century landfills, a responsive pattern that is a cultural signifier of both the modern and the perpetual, and her own two-line “Compound Machine” poetry to engage the complexity and contradiction of our current ecologic-less condition.

Born in 1985, Keeley Haftner obtained her BFA in fine arts in 2011 from Mount Allison University (MTA) and completed her MFA in 2016 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in Fiber and Material Studies. Haftner is the founder and previous director of Street Meet Festival (Saskatoon) for street and graffiti art, now in its fifth year of programming. She is currently one of the four curators and founders of Public Access gallery (Chicago), and one of three producers for the Bad at Sports THINKS to Think blog.

Her work has been shown work internationally at events and venues including Currents International New Media Festival, Nuit Blanche (Toronto), MOCCA, aka artist-run, Hamilton Artist’s Inc., Struts gallery, Studio XX, the Bruno Arts Bank, SÍM (Iceland), Schering Stiftung (Berlin), Randy Alexander Gallery (Chicago) and the Art Institute of Chicago. She has given workshops and talks at galleries, universities, conferences and festivals including AASHE Minneapolis, Transmediale (Berlin), Concordia University (Milieux Institute), and University of Chicago (Hack Arts Lab). She was recently listed as Canadian Art’s top exhibition to see in 2017. Haftner has received grants, awards, public commissions, or residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, Ox-Bow, the Placemaker Program, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, BMO Financial Group’s 1st Art! Art Competition, the Arts, Science & Culture Initiative Collaboration Grant, Soi Fischer, PAVED Media Arts, and HATCH Projects at the Chicago Artist Coalition. She has recently been published in the 3D Additivist Cookbook by Morehshin Allahyari & Daniel Rourke.