archive
Mine Ayn
Sheila PepeNew Installation with Drawings and Sculpture
Trevor Gainer - Project Room
April 21, 2006 - May 27, 2006
Opening Reception: Friday, April 21, 2006, 6-9pm
CHICAGO, IL -- rowlandcontemporary is excited to present Mine Ayn, a transformative, room-size installation by Sheila Pepe in her first solo exhibition in Chicago. Pepe uses sculpture and drawings to traverse a bleak but hopeful landscape as distilled to us through Ayn Rand's writings. In the project room Trevor Gainer presents sculpture, drawings and video that find their core elements residing in the periphery of expectations. Join us for an opening reception Friday, April 21 from 6-9pm. Gallery Hours are Saturday 11-5pm or by appointment. This exhibition will run through May 27.
Mine Ayn
Known for her large scale site-specific and temporary installations, Sheila Pepe takes this opportunity to apply her signature style to our gallery and create an architectural object. Normally comprised of materials such as shoelaces, yarn or nautical toe-line -- Pepe's hand crafted and labor intensive process here uses large rubber strips interlaced together to form a singular object that at once contains and stabilizes the gallery's floating wall.
This momentary object anchors the installation of drawings that distill the surprisingly (alarmingly?) prescient words of Ayn Rand. Riffing on Rand's writings, this timely discussion of 20th century modernist forms of industrial America, provincial utopian constructions that we continue to live with and by, plays itself out through Pepe's mixed-media drawings that read like characters from Rand's novels. Made in a way that confuses the mark of the original with the mark of the handmade copy, they are completely obsolete yet still functional.
Formally coalescing from industrial and handcrafted works into a play of graphical forms, light and shadows, Sheila Pepe's timely Mine Ayn asks where does one find the good parts of that American dream?
Project Room
Having a broad fascination with systems in general, conditions of occurrence, and structural thought, Trevor Gainer's sculpture, drawings and video utilizes his artistic practice to continue his research beyond absolutes.
With Wood Pile, Gainer presents a group of meticulously reconstructed 30 eight-foot 2x4's. Resembling a stack of lumber found at any lumberyard, each 2x4 was cut and carefully reassembled using every other piece while leaving a gap corresponding to the piece left out. The result is a weak and spine-like former shell of itself. With its intended purpose severely compromised, each piece reveals its inherent structural beauty.
Exploring the temporal aspect of predictability, and the social space it occupies, Gainer seeks to address the various associations between an object, what it means, and the way it is expected to act.
Sheila Pepe lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received her BFA from Massachusetts College of Art (Boston, MA) and her MFA from School of the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, MA). Pepe has held solo exhibitions at Susan Inglett Gallery (New York, NY), Bernard Toale Gallery (Boston, MA), and the University of Massachusetts (Amherst, MA). Her work has been included in exhibitions with P.S.1/Museum of Modern Art (Long Island City, NY), the Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia, PA), and Jessica Murray Projects (New York, NY). Pepe's work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Art in America, Art on Paper, The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer and the New Yorker. Her work is in the collections of the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, Goldman Sachs, New York, NY, and List Visual Art Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, among others. Pepe is also the recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award.
Trevor Gainer is currently working toward an MFA at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL. He received his BFA from the University of Colorado, Boulder, CO. Gainer has participated in various group shows in Colorado and San Francisco. He currently resides in Chicago, IL.
