Quiet Echo on Loud Wind

September 2012

ACRE Projects, Chicago, IL

Laura Hart Newlon + Ever Baldwin, and Sofia Leiby

Original Exhibition Text:

Laura Hart Newlon and Ever Baldwin did not plan on making collaborative work together, but upon arriving at ACRE they met and began to build structures in the landscape. Fluorescent tape stretched around wooden frames and planted in the ground or hoisted into the air altered the view from the ACRE dining hall. The structures came to life when a gust of wind passed through the frames, sending the tape into brief, but furious fits of agitation–both giving form to, and taking shape from the wind.

Newlon and Baldwin spent many hours in the gallery considering ways in which the spirit of their structures–still standing in Wisconsin, might find resonance in the gallery. The structures and projections in this show encourage movement through the gallery and awareness of scale. Each change in position reminds the viewer of where they stand in relation to the image source, the structures, and other people, as shadows interrupt the flow of light and the image changes scale on the wall beyond the frame.

By enacting a practice she characterizes as “translating a gesture between media,” Sofia Leiby offers viewers a chance to perform their own reveal. Her work often begins with a painting, photograph, or drawing, which she then alters through screen printing, photocopying, blind contour, or peripheral gazing. For this exhibition Leiby has created an artist’s book that provides a glimpse into this practice and references the central role that writing plays in her creative endeavors.

Leiby’s work has been placed around the gallery to reference this important aspect of her practice. Moving through the gallery, the sight of a print that resembles a painting the viewer encountered moments earlier, establishes a relationship to the first work through a memory. An echo. Something that was uttered and returned slightly different, with a change in volume and shape.

Here three artists have taken memories that are deeply rooted in knowledge of a place and allowed them to resound off the walls of the gallery. It is in the movement from drawing to screen printing and from sculpture to moving image, that we gain distance from the original site, but are also reminded of its capacity for continuity in new forms.

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