Exhibition

  • Karen Reimer: Endless Set #1399
    Karen Reimer
    Artist
    Lorelei Stewart
    Curator
    Gallery 400, Chicago
    Aug 31, 2012 to Oct 20, 2012
  • GRANTEE
    Gallery 400, University of Illinois at Chicago
    GRANT YEAR
    2011

View of Karen Reimer: Endless Set #1399, 2012, Chicago. Courtesy of Gallery 400.

In fall 2012, Gallery 400 presents an exhibition of works by Chicago-based artist Karen Reimer in partnership with the Gahlberg Gallery at the College of DuPage. For Gallery 400, a site-specific, new addition to Reimer's ongoing prime number project, Endless Set (2007–), results in a resonant work that conceptually collapses the dimensions of the Gallery's main exhibition space into a massive, intricately sewn block of fabric. Rooted in mathematical paradox, craft tradition, and minimalist heritage, Reimer’s laboriously handmade sculptural installation posits new relationships between craft, architecture, mathematics, and design. The installation is accompanied by a selection of past artworks that illuminate the role spatial concerns have played in work that has often been read primarily through the lens of craft. A copublished catalogue with documentation, an artist’s interview, and essays by Lauren Berlant, Penelope Dean, and Judith Russi Kirshner, accompanies the two exhibitions.

Karen Reimer is a recipient of both the Artadia Individual Artist Grant and the Richard A. Driehaus Individual Artist Award. She has had solo exhibitions at Goshen College Art Gallery, Indiana; moniquemeloche gallery, Chicago; and Rochester Art Center, Minnesota. Her work has been included in group shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Contemporary Craft Museum, Portland, Oregon; and Wallspace Gallery, New York, among others. Reimer's works have been featured in the edited volumes Contemporary Textiles: The Fabric of Fine Art (Black Dog Publishing, 2008); The Object of Labor: Art, Cloth, and Cultural Production (MIT Press, 2007); By Hand: The Use of Craft in Contemporary Art (Princeton Architectural Press, 2010); and Limited Language—Rewriting Design: Responding to a Feedback Culture (Birkhauser Architecture, 2009). She won the Women's Caucus for the Arts President's Award in 2010, and is an adjunct instructor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Lauren Berlant, essayist, is the George M. Pullman Professor of English and director of the Lesbian and Gay Studies Project at the Center for Gender Studies at the University of Chicago. Berlant writes on formal and informal modes of social belonging or citizenship, which might be organized according to political, racial, sexual, or economic status or might be forged in everyday life, and on the public circulation of emotions like trauma, love, optimism, and political depression.

Penelope Dean, essayist, was previous editor of the journal hunch and editorial consultant for Crib Sheets, Content, and KM3. Her writing has been published in Log, Trans, Archis, Architectural Design, Architectural Record, and Praxis and she is founding editor of Flat Out, a forthcoming architecture and design magazine emanating from America's Midwest. She is also the author of the forthcoming book Delivery without Discipline.

Judith Russi Kirshner, essayist, dean of the College of Architecture and the Arts at University of Illinois at Chicago since 1997, has written for numerous journals such as Frieze and Artforum and exhibition catalogues from venues such as Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Renaissance Society; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Lorelei Stewart, curator, is director of Gallery 400 where in her ten-year tenure she has curated numerous group and one-person exhibitions, including the Joyce Award-winning exhibition Edgar Arceneaux: The Alchemy of Comedy . . . Stupid. In 2002, she initiated the acclaimed At the Edge: Innovative Art in Chicago annual series, a commissioning program that encouraged Chicago area artists' experimental practices. Stewart has served as a juror for numerous local and national artist awards. Stewart, who is interim director of UIC's Museum and Exhibition Studies graduate program, holds an MA in Curatorial Studies from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.

Barbara Wiesen, curator, has been director and curator of the Gahlberg Gallery, McAninch Arts Center at College of DuPage, Glen Ellyn, IL since 2000, and is the chairperson of the College's permanent art collection. At the Gahlberg Gallery, she has organized over seventy-five exhibitions and forty-six exhibition catalogues. She was an assistant professor of Studio Art and director and curator of the Reicher Gallery at Barat College in Lake Forest, IL, from 1996—2000. Wiesen received an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago and a BFA from the University of Iowa.

Founded in 1983, Gallery 400 is one of the nation's most vibrant non-collecting contemporary art, architecture, and design galleries showcasing the work of experimental and interdisciplinary artists. The Gallery's program of exhibitions, lectures, film and video screenings, performances, and special events feature artists at the leading edge of contemporary art. Operating within the College of Architecture and the Arts at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC)—the largest and most diverse university in Chicago—Gallery 400 endeavors to make the arts and artists accessible to a broad spectrum of the public and to cultivate a variety of cultural and intellectual perspectives. Gallery 400 is recognized for its support of the creation of new work, the diversity of its programs and participants, and the development of experimental models for multi-disciplinary exhibition.