Undiscoverable Country
The Riverside Arts Center’s Freeark Gallery + Sculpture Garden is pleased to announce Undiscoverable Country, a two-person exhibition with work by Kate McQuillen and Gina Hunt, guest curated by Robert Burnier. The opening reception will take place Sunday, February 24, 2019 from 3-6pm.
Out of virtually limitless nature, our concepts might be considered as attempts to bring order to chaos, to bring desire within reach. But as they grow and multiply, they become a new, mysterious forest, an ever expanding, perpetually untraversed land; an undiscoverable country. We look upon these synthetic landscapes, and wonder if we can ever know them, whether reconciliation with unknowing could be itself a kind of knowledge.
The works in this exhibition share a tension between precision and openness. Each of them goes to great lengths to create their manifestations and phenomena, and yet each finds itself at the precipice of a new level of uncertainty or a threshold between feeling and fact. Even as they succeed brilliantly in what they set out to do, they reveal something else about ourselves as viewers, about our notions as thinkers, that we may find harder to define. The works prompt us not to consider the usual breaking of boundaries that art commonly proclaims, but perhaps to consider what a boundary really consists of.
–Robert Burnier, Guest Curator
About the Artists:
Kate McQuillen, “No Concrete Plan”, acrylic on panel, 20” x 16” x 1.5”, 2019.
KATE MCQUILLEN works primarily as a printmaker who is exploring the limits of the process to create painting-like images rich in color and depth. The surfaces have a strong, direct, tactile matteness that plays against the near infinities of the spaces they seem to depict. If the Renaissance was fascinated with reproducing the structure of seeing and perspective, McQuillen appears to be employing a depth that reverberates both outwardly and inwardly, touching on the ways we see and the ways we draw from within to create what we see. The works are themselves lush presentations of color that have an immediacy and formal coherence but also will evade any particular, identifiable tonality. The subtlety of shifting hues and coruscating relationships bear up to extended looking and invite us to roam among the bright tensions within.
Agraduate of York University School of the Arts, Media, Performance and Design, in Toronto, Ontario, McQuillen is currently living and working in Brooklyn, NY. She has exhibited extensively across the United States and Canada while making contributions as an art critic, writer and curator for the Super Duchess project space on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Recent exhibition venues for her work also include Johalla Project Space, Chicago, Goldfinch, Chicago and the Massey Klein Gallery, NYC.
Gina Hunt, “Partition”, Hand-dyed scrim, oak, brass nails, and brass hinges, dimensions variable depending on configuration; full dimensions measure 66 inches x 81 inches, 2018.
GINA HUNT is a painter and sculptor who explores physical, spatial relationships largely within the bounds of painting. The “pictures” emerge from a series of relationships among carefully calibrated, placed and offset lattices, grids and patterns. The canvas and its wooden support become image, object, and subject. Referencing the lineages of Op art, Process Art, and hard edged abstraction, her work presents an immediate aesthetic impact by challenging structures that draw the viewer deeper into experiencing them as objects as well as sites of perceptual phenomena. We are left to wonder about the “how” as we regard them pleasurably as form. The artist has developed an extensive language for approaching the construction of the works that brings a certain utility, craft, and drama into their making. Observational representation gives way to observational discovery, and the production of conditions for a broader, even cosmic experience. But if there is magic, it is of a decidedly earthbound origin, as playful forces among the parts turn structural integrity into other kinds of meaning.
Hunt creates abstract paintings, sculptures, and site-specific installations as interdisciplinary platforms to research the complexities of vision and the subjectivity of visual experience. Gina has presented her work nationally and internationally in solo exhibitions at The Franklin, 65Grand, University Galleries at Illinois State University, and Virginia Commonwealth University-Qatar, along with group shows at Chicago Artists Coalition, Alan Koppel Gallery, Cleve Carney Art Gallery, Drew University, Baby Blue Gallery, Practise, DEMO Project, E. Tay Gallery, Elmhurst Art Museum, Hoffman LaChance Contemporary, and Front Room Gallery, among others. Hunt has received artist residency awards from Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar, Hinge Arts, and the Badlands National Park. Her work has been featured in reviews and publications such as The Rib, Gulf Times (Doha, Qatar), Salt Hill, and New American Paintings. Hunt currently lives and works in Chicago, where she is a faculty member within the Drawing, Painting and Printmaking Department at Loyola University Chicago.
About the guest curator:
ROBERT BURNIER (American, b. 1969) is an artist who lives and works in Chicago. He received his M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute in Painting and Drawing in 2016. He also holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania (1991). Exhibitions include Black Tibernius at the Chicago Riverwalk, Of No Particular King, at Arts Club of Chicago, Primary, at Korn Gallery, Drew University, New Jersey, Lip To My Ear, at Vacation Gallery, New York, Objectified, at Trestle Gallery, Brooklyn, So That Justice Should be Tyrant, at Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Ghost Nature, curated by Caroline Picard, at Gallery 400, Chicago, IL and La Box, Bourges, France, The Chicago Effect: Redefining the Middle at the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, IL, Imaginary Landscapes, curated by Allison Glenn, at Chicago Urban Art Society and Jenny From the Color Block, at the Cincinnati Art Academy. His work has been exhibited at art fairs in Miami, New York, Chicago and Copenhagen, Denmark. He has served on the boards of several arts organizations, including Heaven Gallery and Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Chicago.