Only Connect by CarrieSecristGallery

NOVEMBER 21 - FEBRUARY 20, 2020

CARRIE SECRIST GALLERY

CHICAGO IL

All images courtesy the artists and Carrie Secrist Gallery.

Installation images courtesy Nathan Keay.

Cover image: Liliana Porter / Ana Tiscornia, Triangle, (detail) 2017. Graphite, painted cardboard, and metal figurine on wall. 31 x 38.5 inches

Installation view ONLY CONNECT. (left) Jesse Harrod, Bon Bon, 2019. Paracord, wood, sculpy, faux flowers, gold chain. 6 x 3 x 3 ft. (right) Diana Guerrero-Maciá installation view of drawings, each: 2020. Unique collages with paint and archival inkjet print on Hahnemuehle Museum Etching paper, 17 x 14.5 inches, framed each. Photo: Nathan Keay

Only Connect is inspired by a short epigraph found on the title page of E.M. Forster’s novel Howards End as an essential reminder of the power of connection. In essence, this “connection” moves beyond the moral and social importance of the relationship between individuals and their backgrounds, and is something more private and essential: the personal and necessary value of connection and mutual understanding, regardless of time.

This is an exhibition about the connections artists forge, the conversations they have, and the ways in which they lift each other up. The show presents ten pairings of artists who have connected in variety of diverse ways that express a desire to inspire and be inspired by each other. Some of these connections include a shared studio practice, material consciousness, conceptual underpinnings, sense of community or ethos, explorations outside the visual arts and educational connections.

This curated grouping composed of artists involved with Carrie Secrist Gallery presently and over the year examines connections and art that were made primarily during the disconnected time of 2020. With each collaborative eﬀort, gender plays a role in their creative process but is not the basis on which the work should be considered. Only Connect aspires to present an art world that feeds oﬀ of shared inspiration, dialogue and support for each other's creative evolution.

Megan Greene/Thalia Agosto_

Thalia Agosto was a student of mine for two years at the Chicago High for the Arts. I am interested in our pairing, a mid-career artist with a newly emerging one, as a way of reflecting on the path of an artist’s career, the act of drawing, and the struggle to make work that is somehow resonant.

Diana Guerrero-Maciá/Jesse Harrod It is safe to say that we quickly fell into a deep art crush early on in our friendship. We met as teacher and student but soon after realized we had a kinship as weirdo art makers who shared many crossovers in our lives: Our families are exiles from their homelands; passing is a part of our lived experience; we both code-switched while growing up; the way we use materials is an assertion of our lived experience. Therefore, we believe in the power of materials to speak multitudes.

HOW DO YOU CONNECT?

Antonia Contro/Clara Lyon/Hannah Collins This is where Correspondence, my visual and musical collaboration with violinist Clara Lyon and cellist Hannah Collins began at the advent of COVID: We were bewildered and anxious; words were ineﬀective. Art was the shared language we called upon to find balance and inspire hope; to connect. English, Italian, and art—I am multilingual. These languages are all tools for relating, for communicating. Art is my preverbal, intuitive, and conceptual language, the one that provokes ideas and catalyzes making. It is especially rewarding to share an idea and develop a project across multiple disciplines with kindred artists, practitioners, and thinkers; to investigate, deepen, and expand a vision through collaboration.

From left to right: Antonia Contro, Hannah Collins and Clara Lyon in Contro’s Chicago studio

Diana Guerrero-Maciá and Jesse Harrod

Megan Greene and Thalia Agosto

Earth Art Creatives/Carolyn Ottmers Earth Art Creatives is a new collaborative that came into being in part as a result of the unforeseeable lockdown of 2020. In the spring of 2018, we acquired the neighboring property to our home and began to create an outdoor curation that mirrored the interior of our home. Treating the botanical elements of the garden as an artistic medium as well as integrating artworks into the landscape, a unique, sustainable and tranquil environment was established, moments before we all would begin to understand the importance of our outdoor space during a pandemic. The organic sculptures of Carolyn Ottmers have long shared my interest in nature as it can be translated in art. Her hanging stainless steel "Splices" are installed amongst the wisteria and honeysuckle trellises, creating a magical conversation in an urban garden space.

Dannielle Tegeder/Sharmistha Ray Sharmistha Ray, whom I had the pleasure of meeting when she interviewed me for Art Critical, utilizes their subjectivities to explore the experience of belonging and displacement. Our practices intersect in their embrace of abstraction as a means of expressing spirituality and deconstructing oppressive systems. By forging an independent material lexicon, our work establishes an alternative art historical narrative grounded in the mysticism of collaboration and consciousness.

Liliana Porter/Ana Tiscornia Our collaborations (Porter/Tiscornia) started more than 20 years ago making public art and later photography, collages, paintings, videos and theater. I have lived with Ana and shared the studio since 1991. The way we connect is interpolating our own individual perspectives and concepts, creating that way a new narrative that only could happen as a consequence of that inter-action.

HOW DO YOU CONNECT?

Dannielle Tegeder and Sharmistha Ray

Ana Tiscornia and Liliana Porter

Lisa Solar/Liz Nielsen I see a connection between my work and Liz’s in the graphic punch they deliver and the fine-tuned sense of color. I am inspired by her method of working and how it brings the immediacy of painting to the photographic medium with such sophistication. I think we play with the picture plane in a similar way and she pulls oﬀ this deep and clever maneuver adeptly in her work.

Anne Lindberg/Ginny Threefoot Over the last several years, I have found poetry to be a grounding influence on my work, often returning to the work of Alice Oswald, Tomas Tranströmer, Anne Carson, Rumi, Inger Christensen and Emily Dickinson. I selected contemporary poet Ginny Threefoot because we have an uncanny and intuitive relationship with one another’s work. We hold a shared interest in mystery and indeterminacy while rooting each of our works in the mutability and constancy of human life.

Whitney Bedford/Anna Schachte Anna and I "connected" when we were both undergrads at Rhode Island School of Design almost 20 some years ago; we have always remained in touch and, in sight since Anna and her family moved to Los Angeles a few years ago. I admire her emotion, her story telling, and her persistence that she has always carried, now more beautifully than ever.

HOW DO YOU CONNECT?

Heather Becker/Jeanne Gang The connections between Heather Becker and Jeanne Gang are vast and ever changing. They met at an event one evening many years back and talked for hours upon first meeting. Since then their connections cross everything from their individual patterns and the creative process, journaling and drawing, and sharing many other passions like hiking in the forest, yoga, watching birds, and traveling to see various forms of nature and the wild. The two works chosen focus on one of their common interests, birds.

Lisa Solar and Liz Nielsen

Heather Becker and Jeanne Gang

Anne Lindberg and Ginny Threefoot

Whitney Bedford/Anna Schachte

Dannielle Tegeder/Sharmistha Ray

Installation view ONLY CONNECT Dannielle Tegeder, Black Cosmologies Series, 2019

Dannielle Tegeder

Blackout Cosmologie 1, 2019 Acrylic, gouache and colored pencil on cut paper 9 x 12 inches

Dannielle Tegeder

Blackout Cosmologie 2, 2019 Acrylic, gouache and colored pencil on cut paper 9 x 12 inches

Dannielle Tegeder

Blackout Cosmologie 3, 2019 Acrylic, gouache and colored pencil on cut paper 9 x 12 inches

Dannielle Tegeder

Blackout Cosmologie 4, 2019 Acrylic, gouache and colored pencil on cut paper 9 x 12 inches

Dannielle Tegeder Blackout Cosmologie 5, 2019 Acrylic, gouache and colored pencil on cut paper 9 x 12 inches

Dannielle Tegeder Blackout Cosmologie 8, 2019 Acrylic, gouache and colored pencil on cut paper 9 x 12 inches

Dannielle Tegeder Blackout Cosmologie 6, 2019 Acrylic, gouache and colored pencil on cut paper 9 x 12 inches

Dannielle Tegeder

Blackout Cosmologie 9, 2019 Acrylic, gouache and colored pencil on cut paper 9 x 12 inches

Dannielle Tegeder

Blackout Cosmologie 10, 2019 Acrylic, gouache and colored pencil on cut paper 9 x 12 inches

Dannielle Tegeder

Blackout Cosmologie 13, 2019 Acrylic, gouache and colored pencil on cut paper 9 x 12 inches

Dannielle Tegeder

Blackout Cosmologie 11, 2019 Acrylic, gouache and colored pencil on cut paper 9 x 12 inches

Dannielle Tegeder

Blackout Cosmologie 15, 2019 Acrylic, gouache and colored pencil on cut paper 9 x 12 inches

Dannielle Tegeder

Blackout Cosmologie 16, 2019 Acrylic, gouache and colored pencil on cut paper 9 x 12 inches

Dannielle Tegeder

Blackout Cosmologie 17, 2019 Acrylic, gouache and colored pencil on cut paper 9 x 12 inches

Dannielle Tegeder

Blackout Cosmologie 18, 2019 Acrylic, gouache and colored pencil on cut paper 9 x 12 inches

Dannielle Tegeder

Blackout Cosmologie 19, 2019 Acrylic, gouache and colored pencil on cut paper 9 x 12 inches

Dannielle Tegeder

Blackout Cosmologie 20, 2019 Acrylic, gouache and colored pencil on cut paper 9 x 12 inches

Dannielle Tegeder

Blackout Cosmologie 23, 2019 Acrylic, gouache and colored pencil on cut paper 9 x 12 inches

Dannielle Tegeder

Blackout Cosmologie 21, 2019 Acrylic, gouache and colored pencil on cut paper 9 x 12 inches

Dannielle Tegeder

Blackout Cosmologie 26, 2019 Acrylic, gouache and colored pencil on cut paper 9 x 12 inches

Dannielle Tegeder

Blackout Cosmologie 27, 2019 Acrylic, gouache and colored pencil on cut paper 9 x 12 inches

Dannielle Tegeder

Blackout Cosmologie 29, 2019 Acrylic, gouache and colored pencil on cut paper 9 x 12 inches

Dannielle Tegeder

Blackout Cosmologie 28, 2019 Acrylic, gouache and colored pencil on cut paper 9 x 12 inches

Dannielle Tegeder

Blackout Cosmologie 30, 2019 Acrylic, gouache and colored pencil on cut paper 9 x 12 inches

Installation view ONLY CONNECT. Sharmistha Ray

In these conceptual works on paper, I adapt modes of automatic writing and schematic models to build intuitive geometries. In a process I call “performative South Asian queer-feminist emotional- intellectual labor,” writing-out-of-my-psyche is an iterative act of self-recovery from spaces of erasure. My ‘spirit maps’ are influenced by queer visualities, Hindu and Buddhist yantras and mandalas, South Asian tapestries, meta experiences of landscapes, and the concept of a musical raga (“color,” “dye,” “hue”) in Indian Classical Music, which is a melodic framework for improvisation with symbolic associations to season, time, and mood/emotion. The titles, like the works themselves, perform in order to assert references that can easily be erased in a reading of the work, especially in instances of cultural mistranslation (and, in extreme cases, censorship). They oﬀer clues, but are not intended to be descriptive.

Sharmistha Ray

Cosmic Earth, 2020

Automatic writing with colored pens, stationery stickers and Dollar Store tape on archival sketchbook paper

11.75 x 8.25 inches

Sharmistha Ray

everythinghascometopass, 2020

Automatic writing with markers and colored pens, stickers and washi tape on archival paper

11.75 x 8.25 inches

Sharmistha Ray

AMEYE.MYBROWNEYE, 2020

Automatic writing with colored pens on archival paper

11.75 x 8.25 inches

Sharmistha Ray

Love in the time of Tantra, 2020

Automatic writing with colored pens on archival sketchbook paper

11.75 x 8.25 inches

Sharmistha Ray

night dreams, the sky, fortress in the sun, jaisalmer, 2020

Automatic writing with colored pens on archival paper

11.75 x 8.25 inches

Sharmistha Ray

The eye does not see things but images of things that mean other things [Calvino, 13], 2020

Colored pens, markers and highlighters on archival sketchbook paper

11.75 x 8.25 inches

Sharmistha Ray

you.persist.in.me.to.this.day, 2020

Automatic writing with colored pens on Bristol vellum paper

12 x 9 inches

Anne Lindberg/Ginny Threefoot

Installation view ONLY CONNECT. (left) Anne Lindberg, (right) Ginny Threefoot

solving for x is the fourth collaboration between artist Anne Lindberg and poet Ginny Threefoot. Each of their projects oﬀers the artists an opportunity to explore the indeterminacy of image and language. Lindberg and Threefoot resist making direct correlations between the visual and the verbal, examining alternative ways of understanding what arises when drawing and text coexist.

This collaboration takes its title from the directive in algebra to “solve for x.” By using letters to represent unknown values, algebraic equations allow mathematicians to express general relationships that hold true for every kind of magnitude and admit an infinite number of solutions. The word algebra itself is derived from the Arabic word jabara which means bone-setting, restoration, reunion. In solving for x, the horizontal lines of the drawing build atmosphere and the lines of poetry progress; color slips into language, and the words charge color with symbolic value. Alignments are suggested and “solutions” accumulate.

solving for x acknowledges the necessary existence of both the known and the unknown, the illuminated and the obscured, the coming-into-being and the disappearing. The poem presents a sequence of variables, and the drawing’s elements recede and emerge, allowing word and image to move toward resolution.

Anne Lindberg solving for x, 2020 Graphite and colored pencils on mat board 50 x 40 inches

Ginny Threefoot solving for X, 2020 Vinyl installation 32 inches x 23 inches

Lisa Solar/Liz Nielsen

Installation view ONLY CONNECT. Lisa Solar

Lisa Solar Untitled, 2020 Ground pigment on paper 38 x 30.5 inches 41.4 x 33.75 inches, framed LS-000001

Lisa Solar Untitled, 2020 Ground pigment on paper 38 x 30.5 inches 41.4 x 33.75 inches, framed LS-000002

Lisa Solar Untitled, 2020 Ground pigment on paper 14 x 11 inches 11.75 x 10 inches, framed LS-000008

Lisa Solar Untitled, 2020 Ground pigment on paper 14 x 11 inches 11.75 x 10 inches, framed LS-000007

Lisa Solar Untitled, 2020 Ground pigment on paper 14 x 11 inches 11.75 x 10 inches, framed LS-000006

Lisa Solar Untitled, 2020 Ground pigment on paper 14 x 11 inches 11.75 x 10 inches, framed LS-000005

Lisa Solar Untitled, 2020 Ground pigment on paper 14 x 11 inches 11.75 x 10 inches, framed LS-000004

Lisa Solar Untitled, 2020 Ground pigment on paper 14 x 11 inches 11.75 x 10 inches, framed LS-000008

Installation view ONLY CONNECT. Liz Nielsen

Liz Nielsen

Business Lady, 2020