Team Gallery is pleased to announce its appearance at the fifth edition of EXPO Chicago. This marks the gallery’s first participation in the fair. We will be located at booth 216.
James Crosby will be represented by several conceptually related sculptures – each of which demonstrate the artist’s uniquely appropriative mode of making, dissecting the violent history of black individuality in America for both vocabulary and subject matter. Central to this body of work is the figure of Garrett Morgan, a black inventor prominent in the early 20th century. Crosby draws a parallel between his signature innovation – a protective respiratory hood that allowed its wearers to see and breathe in atmospherically hostile environments – and the so-called “assimilation products” (skin-bleaching creams and hair-straightening formulas) that made him rich. Both are instruments of survival, which camouflage their users’ personhood, but allow them to endure inimical, even deadly, environments.
Suzanne McClelland contributes a two-panel painting from her most recent body of paintings, which combine elements of abstraction and written language, the latter of which in this case are culled from the bodily measurements of the world’s highest paid male actors. The artist always employs her medium as a means of investigating the space between text and referent and here, in representing men’s bodies with numbers, McClelland subjects her "sitters" to a simultaneous objectification and corporeal abstraction, creating a strange new approach to portraiture.
Stanley Whitney shows two new framed gouaches, employing his now-iconic compositional style of gridded squares of color. While best known for his large-scale oil paintings, these smaller works on paper showcase the artist’s specific interest in structure, characterized by their use of empty space and lines. They imitate the layout of the canvas works, but to separate ends, emphasizing mark-making and translucent materiality rather than opaque weight and volume.
A new, large-scale work on paper by Samson Young is a manual transcription of bell sounds, which the artist travelled across five continents to record. Young is a trained composer, having received his PhD from Princeton in the subject, and his work dwells in the gulf between music and visual art: these pieces function both as drawings and musical scores. The artist considers the omnipresence of bells across different cultures, and their varying symbolic, religious and political implications.
EXPO Chicago will take place at Navy Pier, and is open to the public from Friday, 23 September through Sunday, 25 September, with a private preview on the evening of Thursday, 22 September.
