Featured artists: Sara Black & Jillian Soto, Ben Fain, Conrad Freiburg, Kelly Kaczynski, Judith Leemann
 
“A body of work that offers something for others to share is a resonating body that makes the voices of many others resound.” – Jan Verwoert
 
How does sculpture, a practice always situated at the boundaries of spectacle, architecture, installation, monument, landscape and machine make sense of itself as a multivalent ‘platform’ whose defining features are continually re-evaluated and re-defined? Participatory and relational practices, collaboratives, platformist practices, conceptual curatorial work and artist as facilitator or organizer are lines that intersect and blur as performative, interactive and multi-vocal practices become the norm in contemporary art practice. Resonating Bodies, an exhibition of work by 6 American sculptors, takes up the condition of contemporary sculpture under the influence of these conditions for practice, ultimately proposing the spectrum of ways sculpture operates as performative.
 
Examining the slippage between participatory art and the platform as art, or, the host (artist/artwork) as the benevolent platform for participation as well as the host “body” for the parasite, Resonating Bodies situates the work of these artists in a proximity that addresses the natural performativity of the sculptural practice alongside the more explicit inclusion of the body. Particularly interested in addressing the conditions of sculpture now – a discipline that has always been subject to the position of the audience in relation to its form – Resonating Bodies demonstrates to various ends the complicated ways that audience is always implicated in the completion of an artwork. Although to some degree each artist invites explicit participation, the audience is situated to activate the work in different ways: as interlocutor, as motor, as witness and implied force. The tension between the artwork and the audience resonates in each of these practices, addressing how studio practices both take up the role of “host” – the creative generator of platforms and sites for action or spectacle – while playing host to the parasitic audience that both activates but also consumes and changes the artwork literally and figuratively.
 
Sara Black received her MFA from the University of Chicago in 2006. She was a co-founder and owner of a social center and cafe at the Experimental Station in Chicago, called Backstory. She is currently the Assistant Professor of Visual Art at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, OH. She’s presented lectures and workshops at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Harvard University, DePaul University, Columbia College, and more. Her work has been exhibited nationally in a variety of spaces including Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, The Smart Museum of Art, The Betty Rymer Gallery, Gallery 400, Hyde Park Art Center, ThreewallsSOLO; Portland’s Museum of Contemporary Craft, and Portland State University; New York’s Park Avenue Armory and Eyebeam: Boston’s Tuft University Gallery, among others.
 
Within her art practice, Sara works both individually and collaboratively. She was a founder of the artist group Material Exchange which was active in Chicago until 2010, and has since been engaged in a number of other collaborative projects with Chicago-based artists. Sara has also worked as an arts organizer and curator. Her projects use carpentry, wood-working, and repair as a time-based method, inherited wood or other retired objects as a material, and imagine building as a physical means of articulating lived relationships in a constant state of renegotiation.
 
Ben Fain received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2008 and is an alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He received a full merit scholarship from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (along with the art collective Dos Pestañeos), a fellowship to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Residency Grant. He co-ran Alogon Gallery, an independent art space in Chicago, from 2007-2009.
 
Ben Fain is a filmmaker, sculptor and parade producer, collapsing these three forms in the production of highly stylized events and documentation that explore psychological space. Known for his provocative parades which utilize the float as stage, Fain moves between the real-time event of the parade as a metaphor for liminal, transitory space and the pseudo-documentary film where the parade is captured as narrative device. Working with non-fiction accounts, Fain teases out classic human dramas from small town and suburban America, making fantastic the stories and rumors that construct day-to-day life.
 
Originally from rural downstate Illinois, Conrad Freiburg asserts that Nothing is in his bones. As a result, he is able to focus his artwork on the moment of constant discovery open to many different disciplines such as music, philosophy, astronomy, and engineering. His sculptures, drawings and installations often include the viewer to be physically interactive to complete the artistic experiment inherent to the work. Demolition and reconstruction are at the forefront of Freiburg’s investigations. He received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute and is represented by Linda Warren Gallery. Freiburg has exhibited at The Hyde Park Art Center, Columbia College A + D Gallery, and is currently completing a site-specific commission, an eleven-sided recording studio and star-gazing structure, at Harold Arts in Chesterhill, Ohio.
 
Kelly Kaczynski is a sculptor and installation artist. Her work, while existing in a temporal-spatial platform, is deeply materials based. Kelly Kaczynski’s sculptures explore the role of the audience in the completion of an artwork. Whether literally inviting the audience to struggle to complete the sculpture through their active participation or presenting them with the empty, pregnant space of the empty stage (with mirrored interior, should they look in and down). Alongside these propositions is a continual engagement with the idea of landscape and land art and questions about the landscape, “outdoors” or the subliminal as a gendered. Through interventionist performances, photography, sculpture and video, Kaczynski interrogates the “tamed” American landscape and the perceived place of the female body, as actor or audience, within it.
 
Kaczynski received an MFA from Bard College (‘03), NY and BA from The Evergreen State College (‘95), WA. She has exhibited with Hyde Park Art Center, IL (‘08), University at Buffalo Art Gallery, NY (‘06), Rowland Contemporary, IL (‘06), Triple Candie, NY (‘05), Gallery 400, University of Illinois at Chicago, IL (‘05), Islip Art Museum, NY (‘03), Cristinerose/Josee Bienvenu Gallery, NY (‘03), DeCordova Museum, MA (‘01), Boston Center for the Arts, MA (‘00). Public installations include projects with the Main Line Art Center, Haverford, PA (‘04), the Interfaith Center of NY, NY ‘(03), Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston and the Boston National Historic Parks (‘02), Boston Public Library (‘00). She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University, IL.
 
Judith Leemann works as an artist, writer, and educator. Building on a long-standing curiosity about the generative potential of translating ideas and methodologies through and across distinct arenas of professional practice, she approaches her work with an eye to interrupting the habits of a context and cultivating new forms of inquiry in the wake of that interruption. What does this look like? The production of performative works in and for the classroom; the bringing of a para-studio process such as reading as far into activity as possible without letting it become writing; the generation of precise didactics for others’ exhibitions while forgoing language and relying only on videotaped choreographies of related object sets.
 
Leemann holds an MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has exhibited work at the Hyde Park Art Center and The Center for Book and Paper Arts in Chicago and Babson College in Wellesley, MA. In 2009 she was a resident at the Design Studio for Social Intervention. She served as Assistant Editor of the anthology The Object of Labor: Art, Cloth,and Cultural Production (School of the Art Institute of Chicago and MIT Press 2007) and has recently published work in the Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy; Frakcija performing art journal; Textile: A Journal of Cloth and Culture; and LTTR. With Shannon Stratton she co-curated Gestures of Resistance at the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, Oregon (2010.) Since 2009 she has produced an annual distributed audio project, reading aloud, at the intersection of her teaching,research, and studio practice. Leemann is currently Assistant Professor in Fine Arts 3D/Fibers at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
 
Jillian Soto is an artist and writer generating work in sculpture, performance and text. He has participated in a variety of public programs including Crew Leading in the California Conservation Corps, where he first learned to build within the State Park System. These collaborative projects remain an indelible influence on his writing and art practice. Soto received a BA in Studio Art from San Francisco State University in 2006 and an MFA in Performance from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011.Soto currently teaches within the Art and Design Department at Chicago State University.
 
Shannon Stratton is a founder and current Executive and Creative Director of threewalls Chicago, a not-for-profit residency and exhibition space. Founded in 2003, threewalls has grown from a start-up exhibition space to a vital visual arts organization that supports contemporary visual arts in Chicago through solo exhibitions for regional artists, residencies, grants to artists, publications, conferences and commissioning programs. With Green Lantern Press she founded and published (via threewalls) PHONEBOOK, a guide to contemporary independant and artist-run projects, now in its third volume. Stratton’s curatorial projects include: Resonating Bodies, The Soap Factory, Minneapolis, Ps & Qs, The Glassel School of Art, Houston and The Hyde Park Arts Center, Chicago (with Jeff Ward); Things to Be Next To at Charlotte Street Foundation, Kansas/threewalls, Chicago (with Kate Hackman); Bellwether at Vox Populi, Philadelphia; Reskilling at Western Front Exhibitions, Vancouver, Canada (with Luanne Martineau) and Gestures of Resistance: Craft, Performance, and the Politics of Slowness (with Judith Leemann), The Portland Museum of Craft, Portland, Oregon. In the summers she works with Harold Arts in SE Ohio, coordinating projects including residencies, festivals and site-specific architecture. Survival has been ongoing temporary, intentional community that met at the Harold site in August of each year.
 
In 2010 Stratton was named one of the top 5 most vital people in the visual arts in Chicago by NewCity. In 2011 she was a fellow of the NAMAC Visual Arts Leadership Institute and a finalist for the Chicago Community Trust Emerging Leader Award. Stratton was one of nine leaders in the arts featured in the Chicago Tribune 2011 Chicagoans of the Year. Stratton teaches in Art History, Theory & Criticism and Fiber & Material Studies departments at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was appointed Critical Studies Fellow at The Cranbrook Academy of Art for fall 2012.