FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
BUCKET RIDER GALLERY continues the spring season with a new installation and paintings by Gisela Insuaste in Gallery One and photographs by Michael Vahrenwald in Gallery Two.
Chicago, IL, May 4, 2007 – Bucket Rider welcomes the spring season with a new installation by Gisela Insuaste entitled cuando llegare, in Gallery One. Running concurrently in our second gallery is the distance between any two points is infinite, a collection of recent photographs by Michael Vahrenwald. The show opens Friday, May 4th with an artist’s reception from 5 to 8 pm, and continues through June 9th.
Chicago-based artist Gisela Insuaste’s work is based on episodic memories that are triggered by real and imagined ethnographic experiences in rural and urban landscapes. These landscapes are precarious: shifty, unstable, unpredictable, unsettled and ambiguous. They reflect the physically, emotionally, and socio-politically charged spaces we currently live in, where political unrest, social unease, and economic instability affect our individual and collective concepts of space, time, history, and memory.
Insuaste’s new project, Cuando Ilegare, represents a shift to a larger scale and overall utility of the given space. The exhibition is comprised of two large installation pieces, one suspended above and one firmly rooted on the ground. The spaces we breathe, from the poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, is a sculptural wall ‘drawing’ that utilizes lengths of painted poplar wood jutting out of the existing walls to create an overhead canopy. Paisajes liminales, an intervention to the existing gallery floor, incorporates large ‘plates’ of painted birch wood in various dimensions and stacks that reveal a new topography to the gallery’s space. The simultaneity of something that hovers precariously and an established firmament below offers the viewer the ability to get inside the installation and experience the way the environment has been interrupted, becoming part of the intervention itself. This idea brings to mind Paul Virlio’s notion of history as “a landscape of events.�? Insuaste has also created new large-scale paintings and works on paper that accompany the installation and references her continuing travels.
Gisela Insuaste was born in New York City in 1975, during a family trip to the states from Ecuador, and received her BA in studio art and anthropology from Dartmouth in 1997. She completed her MFA in painting and drawing at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2003. Cuando Ilegare is Insuaste’s third solo show with Bucket Rider Gallery. Her first two exhibitions, Clandestino and Aerial Nomads took place in October 2003 and April 2005 respectively. She has exhibited her installations at the NIU gallery, Three Arts Club, and the Cultural Center of Chicago, among others. Insuaste was the recipient of the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Individual Artist Award in 2005 and MacDowell Colony fellowships in 2005 and 2006.
Running concurrently in Gallery Two, we present the distance between any two points is infinite, recent photographs by New York based artist Michael Vahrenwald. The title describes a duality between the melodrama and basic geometric principle of such a statement. Vahrenwald’s “Winter Landscapes,�? referring to a series of paintings by Casper David Friedrich, in which the same transcendent scene is repeated, are images of doctor-prescribed depression therapy light boxes shot on a photo gray backdrop. These still-lives’s explore the relationship of the self to a medicinised, surrogate landscape. Also included in this exhibition are two new images that are closer to traditional architectural landscape, describing charged spaces that play with notions of infinity and how the unquantifiable always has a way referring back to the self.
Michael Vahrenwald was born in Davenport, Iowa in 1977 and resides in New York. He received his MFA at Yale University in 2003. He has had recent exhibitions at Mary Boone, D’Amelio Terras, and John Connelly Presents, New York, and was included in The New City: Sub/Urbia in Recent Photography, at The Whitney Museum of American Art, in 2005. His photographs have appeared in Vice Magazine, and he has garnered reviews in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Blindspot, and Architecture.
Please contact the gallery for further information. Also, please note our new location at 835 W. Washington Blvd., 2nd Floor.