2018
LIZ MILLER
PROLIFERATIVE CALAMITY
December 08, 2018 - February 09, 2019
Miller is best known for her intricate installations made of fabric, rope, paint and mixed media elements. Dichotomies are played out in abstract fictions that incorporate fragments of reality. Ornate silhouettes of firearms, killer bees, and deadly plant species are spliced with invented forms, and layered hybrid patterns are a blend of contradictions: organic and synthetic shapes commingle, beautiful forms reference violence, and benign shapes spread to become malignant. Miller utilizes the entirety of Hawthorn to create a new a site-specific work. At times resembling a non-objective landscape, the installation builds upon itself, and viewers must navigate the work’s various facets, becoming actors in what Miller describes as, “a beautiful impossibility.”
The artifice of Miller’s sculptural environments reminds us that the illusion is fleeting. She writes: “The sculptural aspects of the work, created through simple manipulation of mundane materials, play with the precariousness of our perceptions and the fallibility of infrastructure. While at the outset the works seem elaborate, closer inspection reveals the precarious nature of their construction and the mundane materiality that comprises the elaborate façade.”
New works on paper are exhibited alongside the installation.
Liz Miller received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA from the University of Minnesota. Miller’s installations and works on paper have been featured in solo and group exhibitions regionally, nationally and internationally. Miller’s awards include a 2013 McKnight Professional Development Grant from Forecast Public Art; a 2011-12 McKnight Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists; a 2011 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant; a 2007-08 MCAD/Jerome Foundation Fellowship; and Artist Initiative Grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board in 2007, 2009, 2012, 2014, and 2016. Miller lives and works in Good Thunder, MN. She is Professor of Installation and Drawing at Minnesota State University- Mankato.
ANDREA CHUNG
THE MESS YOU MADE
September 14 - November 18, 2018
Andrea Chung, a San Diego-based, interdisciplinary artist who examines the complex intersections between material, process, history and place. Born to a Trinidadian mother and a Jamaican father, Chung considers herself Caribbean-American. Rich in research, process, and at times intensely laborious; Chung's work concerns itself with the far reaching effects of colonization in the Caribbean region.
Chung will often utilize a single process or material to expose the multifaceted aspects of history, migration and labor to unmask the repercussions of colonization that often go unnoticed by those who benefit. Chung has stated, “I hope that people will consider labor and its complicated relationships with cultures that have developed from the descendants of people who were coerced into colonial workforces.”
For The Mess You Made, Chung focuses on “the legacies of tools and their unintended use in the hands of the colonized.” Each tool, made and cast from sugar, will be hung and cast in overwhelming amounts to create an enveloping installation. These objects are not only symbolic of a much larger story, the material sugar also speaks volumes.
All of the materials I use have a history to them. Sugar is a very loaded material” says Chung. “Slaves were brought from all over the world to harvest cane for people’s sugar addiction. I think we take it for granted now, and we don’t really think about how many people’s lives have been affected by the most mundane things like sugar and salt and dyes.”
Andrea Chung received a BFA at Parsons School of Design and an MFA at the Maryland Institute of College of Art. Chung has participated in several residencies including the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Headlands, Vermont Studio Center, the McColl Center for Visual Arts and the Joan Mitchell Center. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship, an Art Matters Grant and the Joan Mitchell Award. Her work has been published in ARC, Small Axe, Harvard’s Transitions and Representations and the Huffington Post. Chung has exhibited nationally and internationally in institutions such as Syracuse University, McColl Center for Visual Arts, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Arthouse, Medulla Gallery in Trinidad, apex art, Deutsche Bank, Royal
West of England Academy, Punkt Ø F 15 in Norway and the 2017 Jamaican Biennial. Her fist solo museum show, You Broke the Ocean in Half Just to be Here...debuted at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in May 2017 and will travel to the UC Davis in 2018. Her work is currently at the Chinese American Museum and the California African American Museum as part of the 2017 Pacific Standard Time and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art for Prospect 4: New Orleans The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp, curated by Trevor Schoonmaker.
JUAN ÁNGEL CHAVEZ
STAYIN' ALIVE
June 09 – September 02, 2018
Juan Ángel Chavez, a Chicago based artist, works with repurposed and found materials to create interactive installations, assemblages, and sculptures that often speak the universal language of human survival, resourcefulness and adaptation.
Born in La Junta, Chihuahua Mexico, Chavez moved to the US with his family at 13. He's currently an active artist in Chicago and a leader within his community. Engaging in public art practices, Chavez has created a series of murals and mosaics throughout Chicago’s neighborhood schools and community centers. His work is also part of the City of Chicago’s public art collection with prominent works in libraries and transit systems. In 2001, Juan began a “non-permission” art installation initiative. Utilizing found objects to create sculptures and assemblages, Chavez changed the notion of the abandoned urban space. This influenced other artists to reclaim the often deserted and boarded up buildings in urban environments. Because of this endeavor, he was awarded the The Richard H. Driehaus Individual Artist Award. Since then he has focused on the creation of large scale installations that transform galleries, museums and cultural centers into interactive environments.
Stayin’ Alive features a variety of work including: Gramophone, a 12ft3 installation, two assemblages titled Chief Wonder and KOKA, as well as a variety of prints. Encompassing the nostalgia of sound and place, Gramophone is built with its own disassembly in mind. The piece comments on the temporality of shelter and refuge as it hangs from the center of the gallery, creating a tent-like structure. The assemblages made of fishing line and rope come from Chavez’s memory of time spent fishing in Mexico as a kid. Chavez recalls how his line used to get tangled. Now, as line and rope entangle within each assemblage, a connective thread of human migration, adaptability, and influence within the urban sphere appear. Binaries of dystopia versus utopia, tension versus suspension, and human needs versus wants are symbolically played out.
Chavez’s work often looks at how the objects, tools, and materials we use shift over time. As technology advances, even language can be additional material we discard. The prints within the show—some of which were done in collaboration with artist Cody Hudson—are the result of discarded font and type. Blending the line of where material ends and language begins, the prints demonstrate how language, like the material and objects, can be a utilized as a form of resourcefulness. Juan Ángel Chavez has exhibited in various local, national and international exhibitions and has been nationally recognized by several prestigious awards: Richard Driehaus individual artist award, Chicago, Illinois Arts Council, Individual Artist Fellowship, Louis Comfort Tiffany award, NY, Artadia individual artist award, NY, 3ARTS award in the visual arts category, Chicago, Joan Mitchell Award for painter and sculptures, NY, and most recently the Joyce Foundation award.
He continues to create new bodies of work and developing ideas for large scale projects. In the meantime, Chavez teaches as a professor in the Sculpture Department of the School of The Art Institute of Chicago, inspiring and encouraging others to see the inherent and creative possibilities within the environments they inhabit.
NICOLA LÒPEZ
RELICS, FIBS, TRASH, AND TREASURES
March 31 – May 26, 2018
Hawthorn Contemporary's inaugural exhibition opening of Relics, Fibs, Trash, and Treasures features Brooklyn-based artist Nicola López. López’s work incorporates installation, printmaking and drawing to create structures that visually conceptualize the evolution of human built landscapes.
Relics, Fibs, Trash, and Treasures includes an expansive installation titled Salvage as well as six prints from López’s Urban Transformation series. Salvage, a continuously evolving index of the artist’s semiotics, incorporates prints, photographs and drawings intermingled with found objects. Bits of chain link fencing, orange mesh barriers, barbed wire and scaffolding are systematically taped and pinned to the wall. With specific attention to the individual materials, we are able to examine their history and reimagine the salvaged item’s future.
Born in Santa Fe, NM, Nicola López lives and works in Brooklyn and teaches at Columbia University in New York City. Through her work in installation, drawing and printmaking, López describes and reconfigures our contemporary—primarily urban—landscape. Her focus on describing ‘place’ stems from an interest in urban planning, architecture and anthropology and it has been fueled by time spent working and traveling in different landscapes. López has received support for her work through a NYFA Fellowhsip in Drawing/Printmaking/Book Arts and a grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, among others. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States and internationally: it been included in group exhibitions at museums including MoMA in NY, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in LA, the Museo Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City and the Denver Art Museum in Denver, CO and featured in solo exhibitions at the Chazen Museum of Art in Madison, WI and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. López’s site-specific work “Un-building Things” is currently on view the Balcony Lounge at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY.