Susan Giles | Words to Grasp | April 7 - May 11, 2024
Strife, 2024, Honeycomb cardboard, 101 x 36 x 48 inches
The Riverside Arts Center’s Freeark Gallery is pleased to present Words to Grasp, a solo exhibition of sculpture, drawing, and video by Susan Giles, curated by Anne Harris.
Exhibition Dates: April 7 - May 11, 2024
Opening Reception: Sunday, April 7, 2024, 3:00 – 6:00 pm
Join us afterwards for a private happy hour across the street at the Quincy Street Distillery.
Gallery Hours: Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays 1:00 – 5:00 pm
Artist Talk: Saturday, April 27, 2024, 2:00 pm
“Movement never lies. It is a barometer telling the state of the soul's weather to all who can read it.”
–Martha Graham (1991), Blood Memory
Susan Giles uses motion-capture technology to record the moving hands of speakers as they express emotion. She then gives sculptural form to these emphatic gestures. The result is monumental ephemerality -- fluid stillness suspended in space and time. Built with honeycombed layers of cardboard (the most ordinary stuff), Giles’s recent site-specific sculptures swirl through large institutional spaces, unfurling and floating. They are weightless and uncanny, like ballet or baroque sculpture. The flying robes of Bernini’s twisting David come to mind.
The organic drama of this experience is at odds with its technologically sophisticated, analytical beginnings. In the end, we’re suspended between sensations: the magical marvel of tour-de-force construction, and the quiet poetry of dispassionate observation -- that emotion can be recorded, measured, and translated into data, like any other natural phenomenon.
In the context of this evolving extended project, we’re excited to see how Giles responds directly to the human scale, domestic character, and intimacy of RAC’s Freeark Gallery.
–Anne Harris, Curator
Barb, 2022, Colored pencil on paper, 18 x 24 inches
Susan Giles is an artist working in interdisciplinary media. Her work has been shown in Chicago at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Hyde Park Art Center, THE MISSION Gallery, and The Renaissance Society, as well as Mixed Greens in New York, Five Years in London, and Galeria Valle Orti in Valencia, Spain. Among her honors are a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, a Fulbright Grant, Individual Artist Project Grants from Chicago’s DCASE, and multiple Illinois Arts Council grants. Major commissions include a permanent sculpture for the University of Chicago and a public art commission with Jason Rosenthal in memory of Amy Krouse Rosenthal for the Chicago Park District.
Giles holds a MFA from Northwestern University and a MA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is Associate Professor in the Department of Contemporary Practices at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Visiting Teaching Fellow in Built Environment, Arts, Design & Architecture at University of New South Wales in Sydney.
Anne Harris’s paintings and drawings have been exhibited at venues ranging from Alexandre Gallery, DC Moore Gallery and Nielsen Gallery to the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian Institute, The Portland Museum of Art, and the California Center for Contemporary Art. Her art is in such public collections as The Fogg Museum at Harvard, The Yale University Art Gallery and The New York Public Library. Grants and awards received include a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and an NEA Individual Artists Fellowship.
Harris is an Associate Professor in the Painting and Drawing Department at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is Chair of the Exhibition Committee at the Riverside Arts Center and has curated numerous exhibitions there. She also is the originator of The Mind's I—an expanding traveling drawing project she does with other artists, which is designed to investigate the complexities of perception and self-perception.
https://anneharrispainting.com/home.html
Gestural Traces and Material Memory, 2023, Artist book with Risograph and inkjet prints, Artwork by Susan Giles, Design and publishing by Riesling Dong, 5 x 10.5 inches, 20 pages, Edition of 27
This project is partially supported by an Individual Artist Program Grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs & Special Events, as well as a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency, a state agency through federal funds provided by the National Endowment for the Arts.
This project is partially supported by The Hambidge Center where the drawings for this project were created during a 2022 residency.