BOLT Project Space

9th MEASURE

A solo exhibition by BOLT Resident Kathryn Trumbull Fimreite

Opening Reception: February 17, 6-9pm

Show runs February 17-March 6, 2012

Kathryn Trumbull Fimreite presents 9th MEASURE, a solo exhibition that navigates the relative association of personal identity and societal roles.  In her most recent work, Trumbull Fimreite has become a surveyor of self, craving to interpret and organize the worlds around and inside us with text-based wall drawings.  In 9th MEASURE, drawings commingle with projected images to embody the rhythm of events and the intuitive patterns in which things in life are learned and experienced.

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Kathryn Trumbull Fimreite is a visual artist living and working in Chicago. She has been a resident and supporter of Catwalk Art Residency, Ox-Bow School of Art and is currently one of the BOLT artists in residence at the Chicago Artists’ Coalition.  In the summer of 2011, as part of an NAP Grant from the City of Chicago, Trumbull Fimreite worked with children from Sunlight African Community Center to create a mural for the Chicago Transit Authority.  She has participated in several public art exhibits (notably Cows on Parade, Chicago Looks, Fine Art Fridges) and her work was selected to promote the New York and Boston Marathons for four consecutive years.  Her work is included in both private and corporate collections. Kathryn Trumbull Fimreite studied Business at the University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse and held a successful ten year career in advertising before passion prevailed and she returned to school to earn her BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

ON EXHIBITION

BOLT Project Space

ASCENT

A solo exhibition by BOLT Resident Homa Shojaie

Opening Reception: January 20, 6-9pm

Show Runs Jan 20-February 10, 2012

Gallery Hours: M-F, 9-5 and by appointment

BOLT Resident Homa Shojaie’s ASCENT

How to Stretch Canvas

Homa Shojaie is into canvas.

While it is typical for an artist to make works on canvas, Shojaie takes a different path, making works in canvas. To approach the material as a basic starting point for making artwork is one thing.  It is a different thing to see it as an occasion to subtract, not to add.  Shojaie’s working process entails taking the fabric apart strand by strand.  Since making large pieces requires her to seat herself on the material to unthread it, she quite literally makes her art in the canvas.

The unraveling transforms the identity of the material.  While not quite the splitting of an atom, Shojaie’s methodical unweaving of the canvas liberates energy, releasing forces that were previously held in check.  Every removal of a strand alters the physical aspect of the piece and thereby produces a new spatial condition. Dismantling the canvas thread by thread can proceed until all that remains is a single thread, or, going just one step further, a chaotic pile of threads that were once organized in an orderly structure.

Canvas is a textile and a textile is a primal technology. To make threads, and to knot them or loom them — these acts belong to the origins of technology.  The textile is also a basic tectonic.  As a sum of intersecting elements, it shares kinship with architecture.  Its strands, woven one over another, can be compared to fundamental elements of building, the post and beam.

It is fair to say that Shojaie’s art partakes of an architectural agenda, defining space.  Her works stands upright, she makes columns:  the smaller ones, spines, cantilevered off the wall; the larger ones spanning from floor to ceiling.  They are all subject to fundamental physical and spatial determinations, to which their position in relation to wall, floor and ceiling attests.  The byplay of fluidity and rigidity in the pieces endow them with presence; they acquire distinctive characters.

Some of the pieces evince their identity by wearing it on their skins.  They are marked along the spine by slender bands of secret calligraphy, cursive lines running between feathered edges.  Here, the textile draws a path to a text isle, where a story, told in a whisper just below the threshold of audibility, unfolds.

Shojaie’s art is not narrative, so it is misleading to say that it “contains” a story.  Taking canvas away from the wall, where it historically relates to the function of window, separates it from a long-standing pictorial tradition.  Shojaie’s work is not representational: it presents.

Nonetheless, being in the presence of her space-defining entities inevitably provokes a desire to make out something of the elusive story of the spine.  We can discern its outlines.  It has levels — above/between/below — where figures, composed by varying degrees of fringe/middle, engage in a range of actions: climbing/subsiding/standing.  It undoubtedly combines wittiness with sobriety, and balances rectitude and abandon.  To try to say more about it would be “as futile as explaining a spider’s web in terms of geometry” (E.B. White.)

To add depth to the background against which Shojaie’s figures appear, we can imagine her workspace: the opposite of threadbare, it is rather rich, or ripe, with threads.  These threads tie it to sister spaces: the loom where Penelope deceived her suitors, the site of Arachne’s fatal contest with Athena, the room where the miller’s daughter watched Rumpelstilskin spin straw into gold, among others.   These kindred sites of arduous labor and dramatic contest highlight several of the qualities of Shojaie’s art work: alchemical, mythic, romantic. If one twists these strands together, they merge into a single line. The artist herself tells us the direction of the line. Not without struggle, it ascends.

Shojaie knows the point where undoing flips over into doing, unmaking into making, taking apart into building.  She recognizes that the only way to emerge is to dive in.  She invites us where she has gone: into canvas, in search of the innermost, where matter and spirit interweave. — Jonathan Miller

Jonathan Miller is a Studio Associate Professor in the College of Architecture at Illinois Institute of Technology.  Since 1995, he has been a film critic on WBEZ-FM, Chicago Public Radio. His work as a photographer and filmmaker has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Chicago Cultural Center; Gallery 400 at UIC; Extension Gallery for Architecture, Chicago; and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MUSAC) in Leon, Spain.