Four years ago Google Maps implemented a new feature to display three-dimensionally rendered shadows of buildings and other large structures. The grayscale marks change angle and size depending on the time of day, allowing one to use the digitized landscape to accurately predict where they might find a patch of sun or shade in the real world. These data-driven shadows hover around their forms like digital ghosts, hugged tightly to their angles much like our own data morphs with our bodies as they move through space. Smart phones algorithmically learn as we navigate, photograph, and speak, understanding more about us and our surroundings with every environmental interaction. The digitized landscape expands with each picture we hashtag, each review we leave for a geological site, and each time a Google street car drives past a previously unglimpsed marker. We stomp on a weed to get closer to a lily for Instagram, mutating the natural environment in lieu of its digital exploration. Even when we are at our most delicate, even as we attempt to hover softly, we still end up leaving a permanent and irreversible impression. 

Download the full press release below. 

Ryan Dewey

Ryan Dewey’s work is a kind of ecological dreaming that takes shape as installation, performance, research, workshops, and land art to highlight the entanglements between people, places, and land use. He has been a resident at ACRE, the Alps Art Academy, and a visiting researcher in the department of cognitive science at Case Western Reserve University (Cleveland) where he wrote Hack the Experience: Tools for Artists from Cognitive Science (Punctum Books). His work blurs disciplinary lines and often appears in unexpected venues including the British Society for Geomorphology, the American Association of Geographers, Kickstarter, the University of Bern, Concordia University (Montreal), the Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative, the Annenberg School for Communication (Philadelphia), Progressive Insurance (Cleveland), MONU (Rotterdam), KERB (Melbourne), and the Art Academy of Cincinnati, as well as more traditional art venues including SPACES, ACRE, and other artist-run spaces.

Morgan Rose Free

Morgan Rose Free is a Canadian emerging artist predominantly working in sculptural assemblage and installation. She has exhibited in the U.S and across Canada including Calgary, Toronto, Montreal, Baltimore and western New York. She held the position of Adjunct Professor of Sculpture and Freshman Foundations at Alfred University for the 2017 academic year, and recently relocated to Montreal QC. In early 2019 she will be spending four months as Artist in Residence at Bunker Projects in Pittsburgh, PA.

Falak Vasa

Falak Vasa (they/she) is an interdisciplinary artist from Bhawanipur, Kolkata, West Bengal, India, currently based in New York City. They recently graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (BFA with a Thesis in Visual and Critical Studies) and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her work intersects performance, video, photography and writing to explore notions of the (post)colonial and the (post)hu.....no, fuck this. Falak really just likes to cook, cuddle, read aloud to friends, find softness in hard things, tenderize everything, and dance to her own music like it’s nobody’s business.

Carla Fisher Schwartz

Carla Fisher Schwartz is a visual artist and educator based in Chicago, IL. Her studio practice investigates the relationship between the mapped image and contemporary notions of exploration, virtuality, and the simulated environment through print media, sculpture and video installation. Her art has been exhibited at venues including the Chicago Artists Coalition (Chicago, IL), the SUBMISSION Gallery (Chicago, IL), and the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum (St. Louis, MO). Recent residencies include ACRE Projects (Steuben, WI) and HATCH Projects (Chicago, IL). Schwartz received her MFA in Visual Arts from Washington University in St. Louis, where she was awarded the Bell Cramer Award in Printmaking, and her BA in Studio Art from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is currently a lecturer in the Department of Art and Architecture at Harold Washington College.

Yi Xin Tong

Yi Xin Tong is a New York-based artist and amateur fisherman. Tong received his BFA from Simon Fraser University in 2012 and MFA from New York University in 2014. In poetic and absurd languages, he uses multimedia installation, site-specific project, video, and sound to analyze seemingly desperate social conditions, and our contradictory relationships with ourselves and with other living beings, objects, and cultural entities. Recent solo exhibitions include NARS Foundation (New York), Vanguard Gallery (Shanghai), Katzman Contemporary (Toronto); group exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, MOCA Shanghai, CAFA Art Museum, Long March Space, Alyssa Davis Gallery, Chambers Fine Art, and Hanart TZ Gallery. He received Canada Council for the Arts Project Grant and Joan Mitchell Foundation Scholarship.

Kate Sierzputowski

Kate Sierzputowski is a freelance writer and curator based in Chicago. Fascinated by artists’ studio processes, she founded the website INSIDE\WITHIN to physically explore and archive the creative spaces of Chicago's emerging and established artists. In addition to running INSIDE\WITHIN, Kate also contributes art writing to Hyperallergic, the Chicago Reader, and Teen Vogue, is a co-director of the artist-run gallery space Julius Caesar, and is half of the curatorial duo Episode with Mary Eleanor Wallace. 

 

Press Release

Opening Reception:

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ACRE Projects
2439 S Oakley Ave
Chicago , IL 60608

Wheelchair Accessible

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