Artist Exhibition: Fleeting by Sandra Binion, on view at Lake Forest College September 2-26, 2021
Congratulations to Sandra Binion, one of our fiscally sponsored artists, for her upcoming exhibition at Lake Forest College! Full details below, along with a list of accompanying concert performances featuring Carol Genetti, Kioto Aoki, and Katinka Kleijn!
from Lake Forest College:
Lake Forest College is pleased to present a double exhibition of work by Chicago artist Sandra Binion, Fleeting and Aftermath, September 2—26, 2021, at the college’s Durand Art Institute.
Fleeting is a multi-media exhibition that includes video, photography, watercolor, sculpture, and sound installed with close attention to the Sonnenshein Gallery’s architecture, color and lighting. Fleeting is paired with Aftermath, a series of 30 watercolors presented in the adjoining Albright Gallery. The exhibition was in preparation in 2019-2020 and was originally scheduled for fall 2020, but was postponed one year due to the pandemic.
Three years in the making, Fleeting is an installation of artworks in dialogue that explore and celebrate experiences that are fragile and ephemeral, that inspire perseverance, and that leave lasting emotional imprints. Each artwork has its own individual background and resonance within this overall theme. For example, the two-channel video Blue Tarp frames a tattered tarp blowing in the wind whose delicate undulation is inseparable from its time-worn deterioration; the sculpture Root renders a hydrangea root unearthed from a family garden in bronze, a medium with a long history of memorialization; and the large-scale photographic diptych Woman on the Rue Chapon presents glimpses into the life of a woman living estranged but steadfast in a disarrayed Paris apartment. These and the other works in the exhibition are amplified by two vitrines placed just outside the galleries. Originally from the Field Museum, they are subtly returned to their didactic and natural history origins: one contains objects poetically tracing the artist’s influences and research for the exhibition, the other is completely filled with grasses from a regional prairie. The watercolor series Aftermath interweaves delicate mark-making and erasure in eccentric minimal compositions. Executed in 2016 during a residency in Tuscany, they accentuate an intense and intimate engagement with natural elements on the verge of decay and disappearance.
The exhibition is further extended with three musical events presented free to the public. Three women improvisers from Chicago will present solo concerts in the atrium of the Durand Art Institute that opens onto the galleries: vocalist Carol Genetti (September 11), taiko drummer Kioto Aoki (September 18), and cellist Katinka Kleijn (September 25). These performances will take full advantage of the wooden atrium’s warm and reverberant acoustics, which—like the exhibition— give material presence to an ephemeral experience.
A 64-page catalog accompanies the exhibition, with essays by Domietta Torlasco (Northwestern University) and Linda Lappin (University of Rome), designed by Chicago graphic designer Sam Silvio. The artist’s book version of Aftermath will also be available.
Sandra Binion is an interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago who makes visual art works, video installations, and live performances. During a forty-year career of uninterrupted artistic activity, she has presented performances, exhibitions and screenings in numerous venues in the US and Europe, including three of the Annual Avant-Garde Art Festivals curated by Charlotte Moorman; Institut Unzeit in Berlin; The House of Sweden in Washington, DC; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; Passaggi Arte Contemporanea Pisa, Italy; and many others. Most recently her practice has manifested in multi-media exhibitions that draw together video installation, photography, painting and sound in dialogue with architecture, resulting in poetic interpretations of particular places and narratives. Her multi-media project Distillé, a re-figuration of Gustave Flaubert’s 19th century novel Madame Bovary, has been shown in various iterations: The University Club in Chicago (2014); Abbaye de Noirlac—Centre culturel de rencontre, Bruère-Allichamps (2016); Porte 10, Rouen (2017); Maison de George Sand, Nohant-Vic (2017); Palais Jacques Coeur, Bourges (2017); and Kyoto City University of the Arts (KCUA) in Japan (2019). The double exhibition of Distillé and the related photographic series Searching for Emma is featured at the bicentennial celebration of Flaubert’s birth in 2021 at the Centre d’art contemporain de la Matmut, Saint-Pierre-de Varengeville near Rouen.