In your head
featuring Dan Hojnacki, Chris Zain and Keeley Haftner
Chicago Artist Coalition HATCH Curatorial Residency
May 26 - June 15, 2017
A song can quickly trigger recollections of a memory once forgotten. A melody can bring forward poetry that mouths stumble over, recalling a tune long filed away. Searching interiorly for that one thing, the mind leads us through a process of connecting time and space. Guided by voices. Tumbling around in your head, a million images procure a randomized narrative. The exhibition, In your head, considers memory as information transformed by material and time. Developed out of conceptual practices, each artist approaches their material through a process of experimentation by which they generate artworks that bare traces of a former life or a moment past.
Daniel Hojnacki’s images and installations respond to the study of cognition, with particular interest in the biography of a historical figure in the field of psychology and neuroscience commonly known as patient HM. Through a practice predominantly centered around experimental photographic techniques while incorporating basic construction materials, Hojnacki’s new body of work emulates elements of memory games in a series of photograms, employing repeated shapes, mazes and patterns. The mazes navigate like consciousness with no clear direction, wandering the surface of the paper. Materially, they come full circle — the image produced is simply the memory of the paper once resting on its surface, eidetic by design. A large scale installation yields faint tracings of representational images, signaling elements of domestic space. Between the varying sharpness of the edges within each photogram and the buried layers of photographs hidden in textured wall paint, there is a reminiscence for time and place mixed with confusion as images come in and out of focus.
Chris Zain’s painted-flocked tar pieces and surface treated ceramic forms conceptually tether memory to the body (as place). Containers for all sentience, our physical bodies are home to a history of touches. These architectural references slump with gravity on shape and texture, harkening anti-form artworks, most recognizably Robert Morris’ Pink Felt. The ceramic skeletal forms cradle fleshy paper pulp like dust packed tightly into the corner of an abandoned room. Throughout the gallery spaces are outlined, subtle layers of evidence of the artist’s physical contact with the walls and floors. A flocked line drawn for tracing the room by touch placed at different heights allows the viewer to feel your way around the exhibition. Her work anchors the notion that memory is captured by connecting thoughts to the body and without it there is no time capsule.
Keeley Haftner’s series Sculptures of Other Sculptors Sculptures transforms what was once someone else’s discarded artworks into artworks again. These forms renewed, aesthetically and conceptually reference the genius of its previous life. The interior folds of individual ceramic pieces in Bulges (Alicia Everett) trap flashes of color from gazes now removed by tumbling the fragments, eroded by sand. The machinations of Littoral actively forget its own contents as it self destructs while simultaneously revealing an integral process within Haftner’s practice. Bricks for Walls or Windows (Yvette Mayorga) reimagines borders and buildings, reconnecting to landscapes as the setting for memories, although often distorted by perspective.