Exhibition Archive

Archive
Karen Ami

Karen Ami

Karen Ami: WELL-KEPT RUINS

Opening Reception: Friday, September 6, 2024, 5-8pm

Chicago-based artist Karen Ami presents a series of interdisciplinary mosaic works in 'Well-Kept Ruins,' an exhibition addressing brokenness, chaos, and repair in the context of adoption and post-Holocaust generational trauma. These works incorporate inscribed and carved ceramic shards, sculpture, writing, drawing, and collage, an entanglement of her narrative, autoethnographic practice, and art research. This year, several of these selected works were created and exhibited during her PhD dissertation research in Berlin, Germany, the site of maternal and ancestral threads severed by the Holocaust. Ami's works examine feminist identity and familial repair, a re-connection to the remnants and apparitions that remain after loss and disruption. The exhibition's title is inspired by feminist theorist poet Hélène Cixous’s reflective memoir on returning to what remains of the past. The manifestation of these well-kept ruins is about refusing closure, rebuilding imaginary places around the fragments that remain restless yet still before us.

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Denise Bellezzo

Denise Bellezzo

Denise Bellezzo: NEW WORK: ALTERED PAGES

Opening Reception: Friday, September 6, 2024, 5-8pm

NEW WORK: ALTERED PAGES is a series of drawings and notations on and of organic images. Using the base imagery to respond to, I can modify, eliminate, or accent patterns and textures. Contour line is applied and masked and applied again to build up layers of information. Book pages, maps, floor plans, aerial photography are all starting points for my process. From these previous images, I respond using additive and subtractive techniques; counteracting , engaging, modifying until a satisfying conclusion is reached. For me, a sense of whimsy is encouraged as a response to the papers. A continuous layering of pattern, line, or textures allows for a formalist structure to be imposed that helps simplify the end result.

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