Puns and Rebuses in Chinese Art

January 28, 2010 - March 24, 2010

TEACHING GALLERY

Curated by Ankeney Weitz, Associate Professor of Art and East Asian Studies

Chinese decorative art mostly consists of auspicious imagery, including many varieties of flowers—especially hibiscus, peony, and lotus—and animals like bats, dragons, cranes, and bees. By joining several images together, Chinese artists inscribed clever puns or rebuses upon the surfaces of objects and paintings. Understanding the images in this exhibition will depend on a special kind of reading in which the sound of the symbol’s name rhymes with the sound of another word or phrase.

Experimental Geography

February 21, 2010 - May 30, 2010

DAVIS GALLERY,UPPER JETTÉ GALLERIES

The manifestations of “experimental geography” (a term coined by geographer Trevor Paglen in 2002) run the gamut of contemporary art practice today: sewn cloth cities that spill out of suitcases, bus tours through water treatment centers, performers climbing up the sides of buildings, and sound works capturing the buzz of electric waves on the power grid. The exhibition presents a panoptic view of this new practice, through a wide range of mediums including sound and video installations, photography, sculpture, and experimental cartography.  

Artists in the exhibition: Francis Alÿs, AREA Chicago, The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), The Center for Urban  Pedagogy   (CUP), e-Xplo, Ilana Halperin, kanarinka (Catherine D'lgnazio), Julia Meltzer and David Thorne, Lize Mogel, Multiplicity, Trevor Paglen, Raqs Media Collective, Ellen Rothenberg, Spurse, Deborah Stratman, Daniel Tucker, Alex Villar, Yin Xiuzhen

Experimental Geography is curated by Nato Thompson, curator at Creative Time in New York.  The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue, co-published by iCI (Independent Curators International) and Melville House, that includes essays by Thompson, Jeffrey Kastner, and Trevor Paglen.