Opening reception Wednesday September 1, 7-10pm
with live music by Boise Bob and His Backyard Band, Dino Felipe, Pocket of Lollipops, Viking Funeral and Otto von Schirach

Featuring works by:
Bhakti Baxter, Christopher Bradley, Bruce Conkle, Robin Griffiths, Richard Haden, Jay Hines, Brookhart Jonquil, Sinisa Kukec, Justin H. Long, David Marsh, Daniel Nevers, Daniel Newman, Matt Nichols, Brandon Opalka, Cheryl Pope, Ralph Provisero, Carlos Rigau, Audrey Hasen Russell, David Shaw, Shoplifter, Magnus Sigurdarson, sleeper, TooT and Kyle Trowbridge.

Here’s the exhibition’s story -
The atomic structure of metal is imperfect. The atoms group together in an interlocking hexagonal pattern, but there are inconsistencies in the pattern that are hard to predict. The raft of bubbles on the surface of a liquid, called a bubble raft, is a naturally occurring model of the interlocking hexagonal pattern at the molecular level of metals. The bubble raft also models the defects in the pattern.

The bubble raft evokes the generative stage of the exhibition. Bubbles, like objects, can exist on their own. This exhibition was formed from recent experiences seeing work and studio visits. Many of the works that resonated were sculptural - specifically objects and not installation. Independent bubbles rise to the surface and join with others. The objects’ physical form, combination of materials, absurdity and subtle humor begged comparison to one another, especially when shown together in an exhibition.

A bubble raft has its own inherent dynamics, like metal, or a practice, or an exhibition.

Dorsch Gallery
151 NW 24 St
Miami, FL 33127
305-576-1278
Hours: Tue-Sat, 12-5
dorschgallery.com

Carson Fisk-Vitori
Chad Kouri
Brookhart Jonquil
Rachel Niffenegger
Luke Willard
Scott Jarrett
Mark Beasley
Robert Andrade
Omair Hussain
Jes Takla

These five artists explore methods of transforming language—through speech, academic texts and historical narratives—into experiences.

Daniel Lavitt’s GRAPEVINE, an interactive telecommunications network, and Brandon Alvendia’s distribution series, REMAINDERS, create a site of dissemination for spoken word and text pulled from the public domain and from the physical site.
ON MATTER, ON MEMORIES is Scott Carter’s installation explores the way shifting patterns of words affect memory of an event as strips of paper haphazardly collect around the gallery.
Brookhart Jonquil’s Untitled (ESSAY WITHOUT WORDS NO. 1) and Eric Fleischauer’s ASSIGNED AND RECOMMENDED explore, through the written page and physical space, both the fragile, ephemeral nature of language and its ability to overwhelm.

Noble & Superior Projects is a contemporary art gallery featuring emerging and established artists who challenge the boundaries of their medium. Co-Curators Patrick Bobilin and Erin Nixon employ their combined experience and expertise to create unique interactions with innovative and accessible media.

Here’s the catalog text for my curated section:

“Transformations and Reflections”

Some transformations are like a scalpel or a pen, an insertion, an operation. Some are like alchemy, or like a vehicle changing gears. Some transformations are like a rockslide, and some rockslides take a thousand years, and some never happen at all. With widely varying concerns and practices, each of these artists explore the relationship of one thing to another— be it material, spatial, or psychological. The shifts in perception embedded in their work invite the viewer to take a second look, and reconsider what it is that they are actually perceiving.

Brookhart Jonquil’s work engages the physical and psychological processes of perception, playing with our expectations in order to create an uncanny oscillation between the simple and the seemingly impossible. Never Odd or Even is part of a recent body of work involving doubles and reflections. In this series, the audience is drawn back and forth between recognizing the objects as unique and as inextricably contingent to their counterparts. In Never Odd or Even, the physically disorienting angle of the room and the sharp intersection of its objects further complicate the attempt to locate this relationship between parts.

Dave Murray’s studio practice is self-reflexive, meditating on what it means to produce, the stakes inherent in the act of creation, and what can be done with the failure that goes hand-in-hand with endeavor. He works by creating scenarios whose potential for failure and transcendence exist in equal proportion. Frequently, these scenarios are based on misunderstandings of how the world works. Often times the spectacular and the underwhelming sit side by side in the images and objects that result from this experimentation. At stake is the hope that through our agency and beliefs we may transgress, if only in a minor way, the material limits of our existence, and thus re-write the rules as we go along.

Emily Hermant’s work focuses on representations that reveal the hidden meanings and patterns in communication, intimacy, and desire. She is especially intrigued by the ways in which seemingly ordinary interactions can be transformed to take on extraordinary meaning. Hermant’s sculptural installations touch on these transformations using a variety of materials, including fiber, wood, plastic, metal, and digital media. While exploring such transformations, she finds herself continually drawn to themes and modes of working in which simplicity, both in meaning and in form, serves as a basis for complex, layered work. Other recurring elements and themes in the visual and tactile forms she creates include strength and delicacy, permanence and transience, and attachment and isolation.

Tim Graham’s practice involves exploring sites of production and display and trying to find the similarities and differences between them. He is interested in how work created in a production site can be modified to adapt to its display location. Graham works across media and uses whatever material he thinks will best address the concerns of its place of display. He makes sculptures, videos, books, and works on the Internet to investigate the different strategies of different spaces.

Rachel Slotnick is interested in the place in which prose poetry and painting intersect. The synthesis of these two forms results in a more fully realized conglomerate of the landscape of memory. We don’t always remember in narrative. Sometimes images, sensations, and fictions can seem much more vivid than a factual recounting of events. Specifically, Slotnick is interested in memory loss and body deterioration, and the way our memories form intricate lies to help us cope. She is very invested in these “fictions” or inventions of the memory, in that we project falsehoods into the world around us, and in much the same way, she is projecting falsehoods onto a blank canvas as a sort of double metaphor.

Excerpts from the catalog by Cecilia Vargas and Greg Stuart:

Brookhart Jonquil’s work, On the Einstein Podolsky Rosen Paradox, confounds our sense of time and space, working off the assumption that crumpling a piece of paper is a singular act, performed in a specific time and a particular space. By presenting six mimetically crumpled papers (Bell’s Theorum whose content is inaccessible to us and seem like remnants of cast off ideas), one is led to question the evidence, and wonder if the same action is happening in different spaces, repetitively, simultaneously or somehow entangled.

Use Value and Access in Contemporary Art

In Das Kapital, Karl Marx makes the distinction between use-value and other, more abstract kinds of value, including exchange and labor value.1 Indeed, use-value is only one particular form of value. Something need not have use-value to have exchange value, and vice versa. Art is often seen as having no use-value whatsoever, despite typically having an exorbitant amount of commodity value. Then what does one do with art when it specifically challenges its own usefulness, incorporating materials from the so-called “useful” world? This question has been frequently raised in art history by Cubist collages, Dada and neo-Dada assemblages, postminimalist sculpture, and continues to be as persistent as ever. The artists in this exhibition enter this dialogue in their own unique ways, complicating the issue through the themes of labor, reclamation, and social critique. However, perhaps the most prescient issue they tackle is mediation’s role in how we defining value and usefulness. It is only through the distance of mediation that we can ask ourselves what these terms mean and how they apply to contemporary art. It is through the mediation of an object’s “art” status that the useful is redefined.

Participating Artists:

Studio 24E - Jonas Sebura
Studio 25E - Brookhart Jonquil
Studio 26E - Xavier Jimenez
Studio 29E - Mik Kastner
Studio 32E - Gary Pennock
Studio 33E - Eric Ashcraft
Studio 35E - Ryan Dunn
Studio 36E - Ben Rosenburg
Studio 37E - Markus Vogl and Margarita Benitez
Studio 38E - TBA

Studio 21W - Mark Beasley and Isabella Ng
Studio 22W - Sam Jaffe
Studio 23W - Yefeng Wang
Studio 25W - Nicholas O’Brien
Studio 33W – Jared Weiss
Studio 34W - Holly Murkerson
Studio 35W - Shirin Mozaffari

Outdoor Gallery - Scott Jarrett
Courtyard - Alex Lee

Tuesday, September 8th at 4pm. Opening at Gallery X at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Friday, September 11th at 5:30pm. At the Church of the Epiphany

Check out costumes and diagrams at www.sissyfuss.us