Friday, January 17, 2014

Center of the Circle/Everything you need is already here

An exhibition of work by Sarah Belknap and Joseph Belknap explores a shared experience with the cosmos, as described by the artists themselves:

“All of us grow up with the sense that there is some personal relationship between us, ourselves, and the universe.”
—Carl Sagan

The first meteorite we physically encountered was at the Hayden Planetarium. It was the Willamette meteorite- steeped in history, controversy and legend. We hugged it and it felt like magic and our hearts were won over and we started making work that looked at the cosmos. In this new body of video, photography and sculpture we try to recreate that magic- we are looking at the moon, meteorites, comets, the myths and romance they produce, and our love of the wild.

A solo exhibition by Stacia Yeapanis exploring repetition, desire and impermanence.

Everything You Need Is Already Here (2014) explores the spiritual predicament of desire, the presence of impermanence in everyday life and the possibility of responding to it with wonder and play, as opposed to anxiety. This solo exhibition brings together works from Specimens (2013), a series of pinned, shadowbox collages made of advertising images collected from glossy magazines, with an improvisational sculptural installation assembled on the floor of Heaven Gallery.

Stacia Yeapanis highlights the nature of impermanence in an installation that only lasts the length of the exhibition. One Day to Install (Heaven Gallery, Chicago) (2014) is inspired by the sites and relics of the human pursuit of a spiritual life—shrines and altars, mandalas, rock gardens and cairns, stupas, rosary beads, icons. The thousands of individual components, which will be reconfigured in future installations, are byproducts of the artist’s private meditation practice. The repeated gesture of coiling, winding, rolling easily-accessible materials, which results in an accumulation of empty centers, becomes an embodied metaphor for presence. Yeapanis selects both manufactured goods and collected detritus of her life as an artist, a consumer, a cultural participant and a waitress, because these materials represent an acceptance and engagement with what is, rather than a striving towards what should/could be.