Heather Kai Smith & Ali Feser: Pawing the Ground in Place
January 20 - March 5, 2023
Opening Reception + Performance featuring Ray Ray Mitrano and Ali Feser
Friday, January 20th
7 PM
Performance featuring Whitney Johnson/Matchess
Friday, February 10th
7 PM
Performance featuring C. Tai Tai
Friday, February 24th
6-8 PM
Ali Feser, We Put the Clouds in the Sky, We Can Take Them Away, 2022, silver gelatin print. Image courtesy of the artist.
Pawing the Ground in Place features new work by Heather Kai Smith and Ali Feser. Feser and Smith use drawing, projection and installation to consider representations of utopian fantasy and longing. They play with material transpositions of photography and, through simultaneous modes of figuration and abstraction, question the associative possibilities of image collection and revisitation. Working across disciplinary boundaries, Pawing the Ground in Place features a wider group of collaborators, including C. Tai Tai and Whitney Johnson (Matchess).
photos by Robert Chase Heishman
Artists
Ali Feser is a cultural anthropologist and interdisciplinary artist from upstate New York. Her work figures the chemical processes of photography—manufacturing, image formation, developing, and decay—as a metonymic language to theorize industrial capitalism and its capacity to transform our senses, our subjectivity, and the material constitution of the earth itself. Across text, installation, image, and performance, she proposes that film is the molecular “cell-form” of industrial capital, endlessly reiterated through new modes of extraction and forms of desire. Feser is currently a Harper Schmidt Fellow and Collegiate Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago. She is currently finishing her book manuscript, Reproducing Photochemical Life in the Imaging Capital of the World.
Heather Kai Smith is a visual artist and educator from Calgary, Canada. Rooted in drawing, her practice explores the communicative potential of the medium. Referencing images of collective engagement, histories of communal living strategies and organized dissent, the work employs pictorial observation and iteration. Her practice has lent itself to projects in animation, printmaking and installation with an emphasis on collaboration. Smith has attended residencies across Canada, the United States, and Germany, while exhibiting her work within a variety of institutional and non-conventional spaces. Smith is currently a Harper-Schmidt Fellow at The University of Chicago teaching in the Department of Visual Arts. Recent independent and collaborative work has been shown at: The Vancouver Art Gallery, Tallinn Art Hall (Estonia), The Walter Phillips Gallery (Banff), studio e gallery (Seattle), and The Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery (Vancouver).
EXHIBITION PROGRAMMING
Opening Reception + Performance featuring Ray Ray Mitrano and Ali Feser
Friday, January 20th
7 PM
Immersed in social practice art, Ray Ray Mitrano crafts unexpected encounters and people-based situations with playful approaches. He explores the merging of civics and art through several organizations, institutions, and collaborations in Rochester, NY and abroad. He strives to cultivate engagement on a local level by bringing creativity into community-based initiatives and activism.
How To Burn Off the Clouds
An experimental, ethnographic, late industrial, soft sci-fi performance piece in which a nuclear priestess, a cloud dweller, an anthropologist, and a Kodak retiree dialogue ekphrastic about how best to let loose a fantasy, how to find grounding when the ground’s been turned toxic, the pleasures of intoxication, and the impossibility of answering the question of whether all this was worth it. Maybe it was worth it and not worth it, all at once? How, after all, can you weigh the family photograph against the fate of a river for perpetuity?
August, 2022. Coprosperity Sphere, Chicago, IL
Performance featuring Whitney Johnson/Matchess
Friday, February 10th
7 PM
Whitney Johnson is a musician, composer and writer living in Chicago. She performs with the viola, as well as combo organ, electronics and voice. As Matchess, she interprets the unknown with sound. Her techniques reproduce meaning through a range of historical material processes, including reel-to-reel tape looping, cassette tape sampling and field recording. In the Matchess Trilogy (2013-2018), Johnson used the limited palette of a 1960s Ace Tone combo organ, an analog Rhythm Ace drum machine, viola and voice to craft a sound collage of transient songs on a bed of ambient noise. She has recently collaborated in improvised and composed settings with Circuit des Yeux, TALsounds, Brett Naucke, Gel Set, Lia Kohl, Macie Stewart, Matt Jencik, Couteau Sang, Lea Bertucci and Sarah Davachi. In tandem with her music practice, she received her doctorate in the sociology of sound from the University of Chicago in 2018, writing a dissertation on the cultural value of embodied sensory perception, particularly in the discipline of sound art.
Photo by Matt Favro
Performance featuring C. Tai Tai
Friday, February 24
6-8 PM
C. Tai Tai is an immigrant artist based in Chicago, with roots in other parts of the US (New York, California), Taiwan, and Latin America. Historically, she performed under the name, Tina Wang. Negotiating a freedom in self expression with the fragility of conformity/belonging are key themes in her work. By inconveniencing the body with burdensome organic and inorganic objects, she challenges assumptions about where these objects belong, who belongs with them, and their relationship to living bodies. For visuals of her work, visit taitaistudios.com
C. Tai Tai, Mold Resistant: when rotting is your power (detail), 2023, stoneware clay, calamine clay, and gelatin. Image courtesy of the artist.
PAWING THE GROUND IN PLACE is presented by Logan Center Exhibitions with support from the Department of Anthropology, the Department of Visual Arts’ Open Practice Committee, and the Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago.