Detail from the installation "Gaussian Blur", 6-color screen print on polyethylene zip-bag by Sonnenzimmer, 2017, 24 x 18 inches
Opening reception: 6-9pm
Performance: 7:30pm
Free
Experimental Sound Studio is pleased to present Gaussian Blur, the first exhibition by Chicago-based publishers, printers, and artists, Sonnenzimmer (Nick Butcher and Nadine Nakanishi) in Audible Gallery.
Gaussian Blur, is an experiment in emotion, material, image, and sound that seeks to harness the crosstalk of graphic abstraction and kinetic motion. For the exhibition, Sonnenzimmer have repurposed industrial plastic bags as a series of wall-mounted sculptures filled with water. Over the course of the exhibition, when activated (the bags are punctured) by the artists, the dripping containers create abstract sound events, as the water descends onto the printed matter below. The bags relieved from their function and freed from their content, the impact ignites the end of one image while beginning the composition of a new one. The slowly dissolving imagery becomes a metaphor for the distance between abstraction and representation. The cyclical meta nature of the exhibition is neither political or apolitical. Instead it represents the most powerful of all leanings, the grey mush of unformulated thought. Completely open to interpretation, yet existing in a closed ecology.
ABOUT SONNEZIMMER
Sonnenzimmer is the collective work of artists Nick Butcher and Nadine Nakanishi. Their collaborative practice was established in 2006 in Chicago, Illinois. Initially recognized for their idiosyncratic commissioned screen-printed posters, their practice has since morphed into an interdisciplinary toolshed spanning multiple platforms, including exhibitions, performance, publishing and design. Equal parts balancing act between art and design and radical reclamation of all aspects of visual expression, the studio is grounded in the lasting potential of the graphic arts, while exploring the physical and conceptual friction between abstraction and communication, and how our humanity is being defined by the substrate of media. They recently published an essay on these thoughts called Graphic Arts Future: Corporeal Knowledge during a residency at Facebook. Their work has been exhibited in the United States, China, and Europe with recent exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Arts Club of Chicago, Chicago; Vebikus Kunsthalle Schaffhausen, Switzerland; and Texas Sate University, San Marcos. They lead lectures and workshops in academic and commercial settings, including visits to The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; California Institute for the Arts, Valencia; Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Minneapolis; Pratt Institute, New York, and Aalto University, Helsinki.
www.sonnenzimmer.com