The Body is Work

The Chicago Artists Coalition is pleased to present The Body is Work, a group exhibition featuring new works by HATCH artists-in-residence, Hale Ekinci, Shir Ende, and Mayumi Lake. The exhibition opens onFriday, March 29, 2019 with a reception from 5-8 pm.

The Body is Work asks, if artists make specific objects, are artists then specific bodies? Considering the works of Ekinci, Ende, and Lake, this exhibition proposes the specific body as a paradigm to comprehend the interlacings of objecthood, artistic labor, and, subjectivity. Works in the show represent a range of material and formal strategies that question authorship and agency, to produce new understandings of the artist’s studio practice.

Hale Ekinci’s embroidered and lace-trimmed compositions foreground the gendered labor of fiber practices. They are imbued with connotations of domesticity, decorative embellishment, and repair. Her transformations of the materials complicate a facile read of gender and craft, by layering family photos under meanders of embroidery to both obscure and embellish them.

Built of hand-cut segments of high-resolution scans of vintage girls’ ceremonial kimonos, Mayumi Lake’s blossoming collages cross-pollinate the minute details of a time-honored Japanese sartorial custom with historical references to Housouge. Transforming tradition and history with digital and manual photographic processes, Lake foregrounds her labor as an act to deconstruct the bodily object of the kimono.

Shir Ende proposes the body itself as object, subjected to the pervasive hegemony of architectural space. In her recent collages, she extends her speculative spatial deconstructions, by rearranging images and pastel planes on the glass surface of a scanner bed. Bodies in motion are interrupted and overlaid with grids and shapes, obscuring the figure as they amplify the architectural contours of the built experience.

The Body is Work is curated by Elliot Reichert.

Image: Hale Ekinci, Untitled Farmers, 2018