News

Color : Fully Engaged
Columbia College
A + D Gallery
September 25 - November 5
Opening reception Thursday, Sept 29th, 5-8pm

"Color makes a comeback every day. We open our eyes, we turn on the light, we see, we remember color. Color: Fully Engaged is a multi-faceted exploration of the meaning and interpretation of color. Via works created as part of fine arts, design and architecture disciplines, this exhibition follows modern and contemporary trajectories of color as both singular idea and associative methodology. Investigating color symbolism and hierarchies within historical, cultural and theoretical contexts, each selection ponders what may or may not be universal about color. The exhibition catalog includes an introduction by curator Jamilee Polson Lacy, essay by Claudine Isé, and artists' interviews."

Contributing artists include Academy Records, Jeanne Dunning, Susan Giles, Dan Gunn, Adriane Herman, Anna Kunz, Jessica Labatte, Matthew Metzger, Liz Nielsen and Nathaniel Robinson.

For his first solo exhibition at moniquemeloche, Dan Gunn (American, born 1980, lives Chicago), who considers himself primarily a painter, will make all new work including wall-based, free-standing, and hanging constructions. Simultaneously present and elusive, Gunn’s work elicits an awareness of the viewer’s own visual and spatial perception through the construction of objects that highlight the interconnected relationship between artist, viewer, and object. “I am trying to construct an indifferent object that has recently become the object of desire, yet leave it in that mixed state,” says Gunn.

Using the many languages of abstraction, Gunn builds a series of malleable surfaces that display different functional, aesthetic and cultural relationships between their constituent parts. However, for Gunn, abstraction is not used to reveal some underlying truth but rather as a way to notice the everyday structures that influence our relationship with pictures. Among other things, Gunn’s work examines our curious relationship to commercial display and the found object. In the artist’s words, “everything changes once it’s found, becoming involved in a chain of associations and symbolic appropriations. A rags to riches story.”

Article by Lauren Viera of the Chicago Tribune

Gunn's abstract objects simultaneously inhabit the realms of painting and sculpture. In his three-dimensional compositions and installations, he explores perceptual phenomena using materials such as glitter, tinsel, chair caning, holographic paper, and patterned fabrics. His structures echo forms of display and domesticity while incorporating familiar found objects. For his UBS 12 x 12 presentation, Gunn explores the "depth" of painting by embedding a series of objects in a large horizontal surface.

12 x 12 Artist Talk: September 13th, 6 pm