RAC Sculpture Garden: Jaclyn Jacunski, Dream Additions
ON VIEW SEPTEMBER 8, 2019 THROUGH THE MONTH OF NOVEMBER
ARTIST’S RECEPTION SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 8, 3-6PM
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**Special Event** Sunday, September 22 from 1-3pm
Participate in THE MURMUR OF DEMOCRACY amidst Jaclyn Jacunski’s installation in the RAC Sculpture Garden
Installation detail of “Dream Additions” in RAC Sculpture Garden
RAC is pleased to announce Dream Additions, a new installation by Jaclyn Jacunski for the RAC Sculpture Garden.
Jacunski’s installation reassembles a batting cage to merge narratives of public parks, sports and play as a site of friendship and agency. Notes the artist, “the work folds in multiple meanings that go beyond gentrification and systems of capitalist property, to where the possibilities for a non-alienated life could spill into our desire for change in these times of distress and division.”
Installation view of “Dream Additions” in RAC Sculpture Garden
A chain-link fence is an object devoid of color, scaled-down, and abstracted by repeated patterns. Typically, chain-link is a gritty and sobering architectural object surrounding and dividing private property and vacant lots. This object becomes especially charged when taken out of context. The chain link’s geometric pattern builds a frame to look through, to observe the landscape, speculate, and selectively view what lies beyond.
Jacunski’s steel chain-link makes a framework, a warp and weft that is filled in and woven on the surface with geometric patterns and embellished with light-reflecting colored acrylic, providing a counterweight that mutates perspectives for the viewers who walk through and around the piece.
Installation view of “Dream Additions” in RAC Sculpture Garden
HERE
In my neighborhood
buildings
homes
and lots
guarded by chain-link fences.
The fence keeps out wind
collecting menus
flamin’ Cheeto bags
plastic grocery bags
cigarillo wrappers
green, brown, and clear glass bottles.
It is a crude security system
deterring little shits
jumping the twisted rose wall
and stealing your bike.
Walking my block, I squint
Take in the warm coral West Side sunset
cars play music so loud
the base shakes my earrings
My body vibrates.
My neighbor pushes a snack cart
coming from the baseball games in the park.
It jiggles and has a bike horn
decorated with dangling
stuffed bags of bright orange chicarone.
She calls to tell me
She is here
I get cherry flavored ice
She turns and murmurs something in Spanish
To the boys playing soccer in the street
the man sitting on the stoop.
Then she says back to me
“Come buy my tamales
I have bean and chicken.”
We pass the chain link fence woven with
yellow
red
pink roses
I am invited in.
Smiling faces in the kitchen
hugs and I stumble through kisses
on both cheeks
Aunts
Uncles
a grandmother
cousins
are all there.
I like their home.
She explained to me
her husband bought the property
when no one would even
drive through
the neighborhood
She points to her neighbor
who has video cameras dotted all over his house
that wasn’t very long ago.
Her husband planted the roses
for her
when they moved in.
“And now,
look at you
here”
More of their family moved in
they saved
to expand the kitchen
and now
she has grandchildren
has things to protect
here
each adds to the dream
–Jaclyn Jacunski
Installation view of “Dream Additions” in RAC Sculpture Garden
Artist’s Bio:
Jaclyn Jacunski is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist who has been exhibited locally and nationally in museums, public spaces, and galleries. Her work engages the intersections of the aesthetic and the political by using research as a tool to interrogate contested spaces. The interrogation is a search for understanding in political controversies that surround land, communities, and acts of resistance. Known for using materials scavenged from building sites, often in Chicago neighborhoods, Jacunski reveals how neighborhood landscapes become expressions of a lived experience resisting powerful cultural systems such as gentrification, environmental threats, and state violence. Currently, she is the Director of Community Engagement at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) where she works closely with local leaders and residents of the west side neighborhood of North Lawndale to develop art and design programming with the community. Jacunski has an M.F.A. in Printmaking from SAIC and a B.F.A. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and has taught at SAIC and Harrington College of Design.