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Karen Lebergott - Coming Apart - In-Visible Cities
Edra Soto - The Chacon-Soto Show: Featuring 'The Greatest Companions'
November 7 - December 13, 2008
Opening Reception: Friday, November 7, 2008, 6-9pm
Gallery Hours: Friday - Saturday, 11a.m - 5 p.m. or by appointment
CHICAGO, IL - rowlandcontemporary is pleased to present Coming Apart - In-Visible Cities, a solo exhibition by Chicago artist Karen Lebergott. In the north gallery, Edra Soto presents The Chacon-Soto Show: Featuring 'The Greatest Companions'. Both exhibitions explore deviating viewpoints of identity and dislocation as mitigated through the lens of traditional systems of mapping, landscape, and pop culture, respectively. This exhibition will run from November 7 - December 13, 2008.
Through her longtime fascination with systems of mapping, plans and hybrid land signs, Karen Lebergott has created a consistent body of paintings and drawings that investigate our sense of history, memory, identity, culture and displacement. Coming Apart - In-Visible Cities continues this ongoing dialogue and asks us to consider who creates historical memory, what forms the basis of that memory, and is that memory a speculative and unobtainable ideal?
The centerpiece of her exhibition, Disruption, is a large scale mixed media work that travels from the top of the main gallery's north wall and flows, like a river, out onto the gallery floor. Using a variety of mediums including oil, gouache, flash, ink, cassien and paper, Lebergott has created a wildly colorful and sculptural drawing that mimics the effort to capture memory and fact, but results in a work whose fundamental essence is purposely marked by indecision and fragmentation.
A constantly changing landscape, in effect continual destruction and regeneration, can also describe the eradication and redefinition that are hallmarks of the surface constructions of Lebergott's work. Her stylistic references to mountains, figure/ground plans, and water expose connections to both European and Chinese landscapes, and traditional cultural forms. By reconfiguring these elements, Lebergott attempts to create a dialogue between divergent viewpoints and disparate areas of the world, recognizing that through these geographical shifts, we can arrive at notions of identity and citizenship.
Karen Lebergott received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, her BS in Art from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and studied French language and literature at the University of Aix-Marseilles, France. Recent exhibitions include Art Mbassy Galerie, Berlin, Germany, Audible Gallery, Chicago, IL, and The Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, IL.
Puerto Rican pop cultural references abound in Edra Soto's continuing examination of Iris Chacon, the iconic 1970's Puerto Rican television star. The Chacon-Soto Show: Featuring 'The Greatest Companions' examines the role of the once immensely popular Chacon, whose highly sexual personae, provocative dancing and amateurish singing combined to become a high-camp Las Vegas-style revue, complete with backup male dancers.
Soto captures Chacon's celebrated role through a series of gouache paintings, reappropriated plastic toys, and simplified stage sets designed to emulate the campy styling of her television show. The paintings capture Chacon as she was on stage, outlandish and bawdy, and always with her dancers. Here the dancers are rendered with gorilla-like masks or even as gorillas which are meant to diminish the abhorrent male archetype to secondary status. In some instances Soto replaces Chacon herself, a doppelganger of sorts, in an attempt to assume the role of the Latina in popular media and the seemingly endless need for self-overexposure. One can only ask, just who is the beauty and who is the beast?
Edra Soto received an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA from the Escuela de Artes Plasticas de Puerto Rico. She has exhibited throughout Europe and held a residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME. Recent exhibitions include the Chicago Cultural Center and the Hyde Park Art Center.
For more information, please contact the or call 312 421 6275.
