an echo, she is
Catherine Sullivan, D Rosen, and Soo Shin
October 16–November 20, 2020
Curated by Ruslana Lichtzier
CHICAGO, IL—Chicago Manual Style is pleased to present an echo, she is, featuring three women and non-binary artists. Through an intimate system of material and conceptual echoes, D Rosen, Soo Shin, and Catherine Sullivan have produced work that unravels the boundaries surrounding conventional formations of identity as a separate self, or artistic productions as autonomous endeavors. The exhibition exposes a net of influences, of resonance, of polyphony and discord. In it, the artists and curator Ruslana Lichtzier investigate an inherent otherness that female and non-binary bodies embody from within.
The myth of Narcissus and Echo plays a subsidiary role in the psychological construction of identity. Both Freud and Lacan referred to Narcissus while describing their models for identity formation; both men neglected Echo, whose voice they did not hear. Returning to the feminist voices of Deconstruction in order to insist on an ethical stance that embraces ambiguity, the exhibition responds to Echo, who was deprived of her own voice and spoke only through the words of others. We renounce Narcissus.
Relying on physical proximity, the exhibition was formed in the months prior to, and during the pandemic, through ongoing group virtual conversations, studio visits, and visual and textual exchanges. The work towards the exhibition was based on an agreement, among the individual artists and the curator, to enter an unknown and experimental route, and to produce a shared system of echoes. The exact definition of the system remains purposefully omitted; its understanding and implementation were left to the group and each participant’s interpretation.
The design of the exhibition, which provides the audience with the opportunity to view the show from a car, follows the logic of a drive-in theater, while responding to the challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic.
An accompanying website, that echoes the artistic exchange produced towards and during the exhibition, is scheduled to launch on November 23, 2020 following the conclusion of the show.
Inquiries: lichtzier.r@gmail.com
Checklist of Works:
D Rosen
UNITS OF WEIGHT AND MEASURE: can a unit die? 2020
Cast Bronze with Red Patina (Original Object: 3.8 Pounds of Bail Twine
collected at various Farms and Sanctuaries wrapped around a Unit of Measure)
51 x 4 x 2 inches
Scavengers in a Gnaw of Hunger, 2020
Cast Hydrocal, Cast Bronze with Silver Nitrate
(Original Objects: Flock Blocks Carved by Seed Mouse et al over the course of 5 weeks at Julius Caesar Gallery in Chicago, IL in the Fall of 2019. For additional context, the original work made of flock blocks titled Nourishment is a Plinth in Repose can be viewed here)
36 x 20 x 12 inches (Adjusted after install)
An offering for scavengers, for commensal species, to soften the burden
of (y)our perpetual displacement, 2020
Feeding Ritual for Avian Commensal Species, Homemade Vegan Suet Cakes, Feeding Structure, Hog Rings
7 x 4.9 x 1.6 inches
NON-BINARY TEAT, 2020
Daily Care Ritual, Ceramic, Homemade Vegan Bag Balm,
Carved Salt Lick, Carved Soapstone, Bronze Stain
7 x 3 x 3 inches
Soo Shin
Shore; you becoming me, I becoming you, 2020
Patina on steel, stoneware, wax on stoneware, sand, speaker, and sound recorded by Amanda Walters (18minutes 28seconds loop)
H 15 x W 68 x D 24 inches
Hours, Directions, and
Regulations:
The space is open for viewing on Saturdays from 4:00–6:00pm and accessible from the alley behind Superior Street.
To schedule an appointment on a different date/time, please contact: lichtzier.r@gmail.com
Due to health safety measures, visitors cannot access the gallery through Superior Street.
Please wear mask at all times upon arrival, and maintain 6 ft. distance.
See map:
Catherine Sullivan (Los Angeles, CA, 1968)
Trained as an actor and visual artist, Catherine Sullivan began publicly presenting film, theater, and installation works in the late 1990s. Her work is concerned with the psychic dilemmas inherent in dramatic acting and the ways in which history is projected through the body. The ensembles in her film and theater works cope with gestural, stylistic and conceptual regimes drawn from art, media and the histories of the locations where they perform. Anxious worlds are populated by perplexing bodies engaged with the dynamics of self-possession, empathy and aversion, and circumstances of redress in contemporary social life.
Collaborations, solo exhibitions, performances, and films have been presented at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Vienna Secession; Tate Modern, London; Opéra de Lyon, Lyon; Trapdoor Theatre, Chicago; Metro Pictures, New York; Galerie Christian Nagel, Cologne, Galerie Catherine Bastide, Brussels; Gió Marconi Gallery, Milan and Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles. She participated in the Whitney, Moscow and Gwangju biennials; the Berlin International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, and BFI London International Film Festival. She was awarded the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, a United States Artists Walker Fellowship, a Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist Award and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Award. She is an associate professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago.
D Rosen (Iron Mountain, MI, 1988)
D Rosen is an interdisciplinary artist who exhibits and publishes nationally and internationally. They operate from the position that questions of animality are not binary, but rather a tangle of ecologies and richly complicated identities, framed by culture. Rosen attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2018, received an MFA from the University of Chicago in 2013, and a BFA from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design in 2011. In 2020, Rosen created a collaborative web object with support from the Nordic Summer University (Aalborg, Denmark), they will be collaborating with Marcela Torres on a project that conceptualizes scent at Recess (Brooklyn, NY), exhibiting at The Green Gallery (Milwaukee, WI), and will publish an essay on interspecies scent rituals in Olfactory Art and the Political in an Age of Resistance edited by Gwenn-Aël Lynn and Debra Riley Parr for Routledge (New York + London).
Soo Shin (Seoul, South Korea, 1981)
Soo Shin is a visual artist based in Chicago. Often using varied materials such as wood, metal, ceramic, found objects, and highly personal materials, her sculpture explores poetic experiences as a means to expand a personhood of an individual and the keen dynamic between body and place. She finished her M.F.A. at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and holds an M.F.A. and B.F.A. from Ewha Womans University in Seoul, South Korea. Her work has been shown in various locations such as Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and Seoul. She is a recipient of fellowships from MacDowell Colony (New Hampshire), 2014; Vermont Studio Center, 2015; and the Arts/Industry program at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (Wisconsin), 2018.
Ruslana Lichtzier (Tomsk, Former USSR, 1984)
Born in Siberia, Russia, and raised in Israel, Ruslana Lichtzier is a writer, curator, and a Ph.D. student in Art History at Northwestern University. Her background as a migrant propels her to produce cultural work that aims to nest radical imagination of difference and change. Past selected fellowships include Core, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, and Red Bull Arts Detroit. Lichtzier directed Triumph School Manual Project, in Triumph, Illinois, the project space Triumph, Chicago (in collaboration with Ryan Coffey), and the Jewish Artist Fellowship at Spertus, Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership. Recent curatorial projects include the group exhibitions Four Flags, Chicago Manual Style, Chicago, IL (in collaboration with Stephanie Cristello), The Dangerous Professors, Flatland Gallery, Houston, TX (with the support of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston) and the durational exhibition Falling for You, Triumph, Chicago, IL. Lichtzier has contributed to numerous exhibition catalogues and international art publications over the years. She is a contributor writer for THE SEEN, Chicago’s International Journal for Contemporary and Modern Art.