West Town Street Lab, an initiative by Meghan Quinn with support from East Village Association and the West Town Chamber of Commerce, presents its first pop-up art exhibition...
Cross Sections
curated by Casa Duno
featuring works by
Brooke Barnett and Veronica Bruce
West Town Street Lab seeks to enliven vacant storefronts, empty lots and blank walls along West Chicago Avenue with exciting local art and activity. The initiative will bring art and culture to our everyday experience while creating a catalyst for social dialogue through our common interests.
Street Lab is about placemaking, promoting happiness and well being, and inspiring people to take pride in and ownership of their community.
To inaugurate the West Town Street Lab, Casa Duno
highlights two Chicago artists, Brooke Barnett and Veronica Bruce, in Cross Sections, a pop-up exhibition that
transforms a vacant commercial space on Chicago Avenue into a venue for local
art. Chosen for their complementary aesthetic qualities, Barnett and Bruce are
painters who depart from the traditional medium, venturing away from the
two-dimensional and experimenting with materials and object-making. While their
works on paper and canvas evoke the gestural characteristics of expressionism
and the attention to shape and line of geometric abstraction, other works are reminiscent
of the ready-made, with their unusual combinations of everyday materials, like
string, plaster, lace, flannel, plastic, and tassels.
The title Cross
Sections is drawn from the curatorial vision for this exhibition: to
showcase works that are not polished and clean, but rather self-reflexive and
raw. The works selected, while visually intriguing in their presented states,
also reflect the messiness of these artists’ creative processes. And so, in a
way, the works on display are “cross-sections,” or samples, of Barnett and
Bruce’s respective studio practices. Additionally, the unfinished quality of
their works is emphasized by the absence of frames and pedestals. Rather,
pieces are hung on the walls with tacks, clips, and tape or rest directly on
the ground.
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