Making Out, 2017
Collaboration with C Clark, Maggie Wong, Morgan Green, Morris Fox and Nancy Murphy Spicer
SUGS/SITE Gallery, LeRoy Neiman Center
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Making Out
Press Release, October 2017
SITE Sharp, 37 S Wabash, Chicago IL
MAKING OUT turns the SITE gallery into a space of playful resistance. The work will center around a large installation of bleachers that suggest a high school football field — the kind of bleachers that provide a refuge for clandestine kissing. MAKING OUT fosters radical imagination by constructing a particular, touchable, sometimes functional site for envisioning tenderness. This show is a collaboration by a group of artists known as HIVE.
The work is a site of negotiation between power and intimacy. It aims to clarify the question of whether tenderness can resist and alter systemic power structures. This work encourages and explores the practice of making out in the context of institutional subjugation. HIVE intends to remain hopeful via this exploration. HIVE intends, at every step, to acknowledge the possibility that if we keep kissing, we may alter the conditions of our subjugation. At the same time, paradoxically, we humbly acknowledge our helplessness in the face of power: we make out all the same.
Several programs and happenings will take place as we explore these ideas with the gallery’s visitors. Some programs take place under the refuge of the bleachers. Some will be available to stream online, as this show is both local and dispersed. In addition to the bleachers, this show includes interactive sound and touch installations, as well as a limited quantity of free zines.
MAKING OUT is the first exhibition in SITE Galleries by students in SAIC’s Low-Residency MFA program, which was established in 2014. It is a joint effort by HIVE, a group comprised of class of 2018 Low-Residency students Maggie Wong, Nancy Murphy-Spicer, Morris Fox, Morgan Green, Brendan Getz, and C Alex Clark. We are grateful to the faculty, loved-ones, and remote collaborators who join us in this work.
Exterior View. Contact microphones against gallery windows capture passing conversation, in addition to the elevated train and street traffic, and project the sound within the gallery space.
Steel, wood and fabric sculpture installation composed of three bleacher sections which diminish in size as they ascend. Fabric is wrapped in such a way as to repeat the structure above and beneath, while offering a sense of permeability. Each section is joined with three hinges, suggesting a structure that may enclose. While the bleachers are positioned to face out toward the gallery windows, the activated space is beneath them, or ‘under the bleachers’. Participants were encouraged to spend time beneath the structure, as this was the main site of the sound transmission, as well as the site of making out. Additional programming was maintained throughout the run of the exhibition.
Condenser microphone pinned to the gallery back wall. Live feed processed (50ms delay) and projected via three holosonic audio spotlights, filling three interior channels beneath a set of bleachers. Sound from beneath the bleachers is fed back into them, calling attention to a sense of space awareness, and permeability between the inside and outside through felt ‘acoustic walls’.
Contact microphones installed on gallery windows, with live sound feed processed and projected throughout the gallery space. An effect of the uncanny produced through rendering the windows as permeable, ‘breathing membranes.’ The division between inside and outside drifts.
Installation View, “Making Out” October 2017
Outside View, “Making Out” October 2017
Room Sound, Contact Microphones