Please join us for a reception with artist Martine Syms as we celebrate the opening of her new installation, Incense Sweaters & Ice.

The exhibition is presented through Martine Syms’ nomination as a 2018 Graham Foundation Fellow—a new program that provides support for the development and production of original and challenging works and the opportunity to present these projects in an exhibition at the Foundation’s Madlener House galleries in Chicago. The Fellowship program extends the legacy of the Foundation’s first awards, made in 1957, and continues the tradition of support to individuals to explore innovative perspectives on spatial practices in design culture. This presentation of Incense Sweaters & Ice follows the 2017 grant Syms was awarded to produce the film which was shown in the exhibition of the same name at The Museum of Modern Art, curated by Jocelyn Miller, as part of the Elaine Dannheisser Project Series.

Martine Syms works in video, performance, and publishing. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Camden Arts Centre, London; Sadie Coles HQ, London; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Berlin Biennale; Manifesta, Zurich; the ICA London; Bridget Donahue, New York; the Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago; White Flag Projects, St. Louis; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Her work was featured in Surround Audience, the New Museum’s 2015 Triennial. From 2007 to 2011, Syms was codirector of Golden Age, a project space in Chicago focused on printed matter; she is also the founder of Dominica, an independent publishing company dedicated to exploring blackness as a topic, reference, marker, and audience in visual culture. Syms is represented by Bridget Donahue, New York; and Sadie Coles HQ, London.

Image: Martine Syms, Incense Sweaters & Ice (still), 2017, Los Angeles.  Courtesy of the artist and Bridget Donahue, New York

For more information on the exhibition, Incense Sweaters & Ice, click here.

Please note: this event begins at 9 p.m.

Australian composer and multi-instrumentalist, Oren Ambarchi plays the inaugural American performance of “Sbagliato”for two guitars in the first concert of the 2018-19 Lampo series.

He has performed and recorded with a diverse array of artists such as Fennesz, Charlemagne Palestine, Sunn 0)), Thomas Brinkmann, Alvin Lucier, John Zorn, Manuel Gottsching/Ash Ra, Merzbow, Keith Rowe, Akio Suzuki, Phill Niblock, John Tilbury, Richard Pinhas, Evan Parker, Crys Cole, Fire!, and many more. His acclaimed trio with Keiji Haino and Jim O’Rourke performs in Tokyo annually with many of their concerts documented on Ambarchi’s Black Truffle label. Ambarchi has released numerous recordings for labels such as Touch, Editions Mego, Drag City, PAN, Southern Lord, Kranky and Tzadik. In April 2014 Oren Ambarchi performed the first solo version of “Knots” for Lampo. His latest solo release is “Hubris” (2016) and features an astonishing cast of players including Crys Cole, Mark Fell, Arto Lindsay, Jim O’Rourke, Keith Fullerton Whitman, and Ricardo Villalobos amongst others.

Oren Ambarchi (b.1969, Sydney, Australia) is an artist with longstanding interests in transcending conventional instrumental approaches. His work focuses mainly on the exploration of the guitar. Ambarchi’s works are hesitant, tense, and extended song-forms, located in the cracks between several approaches: modern electronics and processing; laminal improvisation and minimalism; hushed, pensive songwriting; the deceptive simplicity and temporal suspensions of composers such as Morton Feldman and Alvin Lucier; and the physicality of rock music, slowed down and stripped back to its bare bones, abstracted and replaced with pure signal.

Since 2010 the Graham Foundation has supported and partnered with Lampo to produce this performance series held at the Madlener House. Lampo, founded in 1997, is a non-profit organization for experimental music and intermedia projects.

Please join us to celebrate the launch of Richard Rezac: Address, a new publication documenting and expanding on the artist’s recent Renaissance Society exhibition, supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation. The catalogue features a generous selection of images, a conversation between the artist and curator Solveig Øvstebø, and new texts by Jennifer R. Gross, James Rondeau, and Matthew Goulish. Hosted in partnership with the Renaissance Society, this evening features a reading by Matthew Goulish.

Workshop: 1–5 p.m., sold out
Talk: 6 p.m.

What types of energy are available to us and why should we diversify and use less? This intimate afternoon workshop session will be followed by a public evening presentation investigating diverse sources of energy and their site-specific pros and cons.

Led by landscape architect Ron Henderson and artist Torkwase Dyson, the workshop considers hydroelectric power and the gravitational potential of energy as a way to examine state changes in matter and liquid. Participants use the fundamental logic of elevation drawing to think through the science of water and the way in which it shapes space.

Ron Henderson is professor and director of the graduate program in landscape architecture and urbanism at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. He is also founding principal of L+A Landscape Architecture, which has received many international, national, and regional awards, including nominations in 2013 and 2017 for the European Union Urban Prize. He is Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects, a Creative Artist Fellow at the US–Japan Friendship Commission, Senior Fellow of Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, and author of The Gardens of Suzhou, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. He received a Graham Foundation grant in 2018 for the program series, "Alfred Caldwell and the Performance of Democracy.”

Image: Excerpt from Henderson's orihon, or folding sketchbooks, include an investigation of water sequences at Ise Shrine in Japan

For more information on the exhibition, Wynter-Wells School, click here.

Workshop: 1–4 p.m., sold out
Performance and Panel Discussion: 6 p.m.

At a time when mass migration due to the effects of climate change has become a critical concern, artist, and designer Andres L. Hernandez, and artist and dancer Zachary Fabri ask how drawing can can be used as an interpretative act of movement to address pressing global issues.

Workshop
Through cross-disciplinary collaboration, drawing exercises, and discussion, this workshop led by Torkwase Dyson in partnership with Andres Luis Hernandez and Zachary Fabri asks participants to reconsider “the things the mind already knows,” a principle Dyson borrows from the artist Jasper Johns regarding innovation in approaching familiar objects or concepts.

No artistic experience is required for the workshop, though willingness to participate in both the discussions and artistic exercises is expected. All workshops are free, but RSVP is required and space is limited.

Performance and Panel Discussion
After the workshop, Hernandez and Fabri will present a new collaborative performance, followed by a panel discussion with Torkwase Dyson and D Soyini Madison.

Andres Luis Hernandez is an artist and educator committed to collaborative and community-based work, currently working on a range of projects with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs. His work explores ways that private and public spaces are used to promote and sustain injustice, often taking the form of archival research, writing, public programming, participatory workshops, ephemeral interventions, and performances within the built environment. Hernandez received his Bachelor of Architecture degree from Cornell University and an MA in art education from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he is an assistant professor in the Department of Art Education.

Zachary Fabri is an artist working in video, photography and drawing. He has been awarded The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art and the New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in interdisciplinary work. Fabri’s work has been exhibited at Art in General, The Studio Museum in Harlem, El Museo del Barrio, The Walker Art Center, The Brooklyn Museum, The Barnes Foundation, Rockelmann & gallery, and Third Streaming. He has collaborated in multidisciplinary projects with choreographer Joanna Kotze at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, and most recently with artist Torkwase Dyson at the Drawing Center in 2018. Currently, he is making drawings on napkins he stole from the Trump Soho Hotel while working as a bus boy. Fabri lives and works in Flatbush Brooklyn.

D. Soyini Madison is professor of Performance Studies, with appointments in the Department of African American Studies and the Department of Anthropology at Northwestern University. Madison has lived and worked in Ghana, as a Senior Fulbright Scholar conducting field research on the interconnections between traditional religion, political economy, and indigenous performance tactics.

Image: Andres L. Hernandez, Untitled (Study for "JRRNYYMNN" in Hammons blue), 2018. Digital edit of photocopy on paper, dimensions variable

For more information on the exhibition, Wynter-Wells School, click here.

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