current
John Arndt - Italian for Travelers
February 1, 2007 - April 5, 2008
Opening Reception: Friday, February 1, 2008, 6-9pm
Gallery Hours: Saturday, 11a.m - 5 p.m. or by appointment
CHICAGO, IL - rowlandcontemporary is pleased to present Italian for Travelers, a solo exhibition by Chicago-based artist John Arndt. This exhibition will run from February 1 - April 5, 2008. This is the artist's second solo exhibition with rowlandcontemporary.
If a handful of phrases were all a person knew of a foreign tongue, could anything of real significance be communicated, anything truly meaningful, or would these words be useful only to help one purchase a Pantheon shaped pencil sharpener? Premiering what is perhaps his most personal work to date, a 30 minute video entitled Italian for Travelers, Arndt constructs a script that re-translates commercially available language recordings by sampling text and ambient sound, while linking rearranged dialogue with local Italian imagery.
Shot on location in Italy during the summer of 2007, Italian for Travelers plays out over the course of one day, in three acts: morning/afternoon/night. Vacillating between seeming trivialities and pensive rumination, Arndt re-contextualizes the vocabulary of language software, jargon intended to help one simply get by, to be a good consumer of another culture, and appropriates it for an end both more intimate and universal.
For this exhibition, Arndt also presents a series of watercolor and graphite drawings that reproduce photocopied notices that were posted throughout Rome and Venice. These notices pleaded for information regarding pets that went missing during a rash of dog abductions. The posters and their representation of stray canines resonate as manifestations of desperation and anxiety, a yearning for connectedness, and the lost state of the dog’s human owners.
John Arndt received his MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Recent exhibitions include The Blue Room, Rome, Italy, Gahlberg Gallery at the College of Dupage (Glen Ellyn, IL), and Suitable (Chicago, IL). He has been reviewed in Art in America, Chicago Tribune, and the New Art Examiner. In 2006 he completed a residency at the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Wendover, UT.
For more information, please contact the or call 312 421 6275.
