Chain Link FabricVitrines of Sorts, Site Gallery
Artists: Camille Casemier, Aleksandra Walaszek, and Yuen Tzue
Curated by Ines Arango-Guingue and Leo Wang
This exhibition showcases works that use the ready-made—previously manufactured industrial objects presented as art—as a starting point. The work’s affinities run deeper: they all ask questions around security, surveillance, and separation. Because they are shown on walls facing the streets—vitrines of sorts—they emphasize how passers-by will inevitably be looking in from the outside.
Aleksandra Wałaszek’s metal fence shown on the window is a result of investigating how the policies at SAIC affect the institution’s architecture and previous meditations on geopolitical borders. This work responds to the site where it’s installed: the school’s public-facing exhibition space. Playing with the metal fabric’s textile quality and hanging it as a soft fiber piece is a comment on SAIC’s strict safety policies disguised under inclusive language.
Camille Casemier’s installation—exhibited on the Monroe window—“How Precious Are the Things We Share However Great or Small How Little Else Means Much to Me Sweetheart, You Are My All” extrapolates on the habit of setting up consumer-grade home surveillance systems, in Casemier’s words, “so no one will take your stuff”. The piece uses live camera feeds to create abstract paintings by projecting superimposing compositions of objects. Inside the building lobby, Tzuen Wu—and their piece “Let’s Make a Deal—Intersection—“ simply uses a car door to symbolize their relationship with their father, a relationship structured around their shared time riding to school. When the door—another object of separation— closed behind them, this intimacy seemed to evaporate.
Inés Arango-Guingue