Image courtesy of G-CADD
We wrote about Granite City Art and Design District—or G-CADD—back in July, on the occasion of its inaugural opening. Or openings, to be exact. If you missed it, we’ll give you the short version here: the fort gondo crew has purchased an entire suite of buildings along State Street in Granite; those venues are being converted to galleries and open-lot art spaces to form an arts district/campus. (For the longer version, read this.)
In August, G-CADD brought on its first curatorial resident, artist JE Baker, who’s collaborated with gondo in the past. She co-curated the show Binderful (which incidentally rhymes with wonderful; it was). She was formerly the Features Editor of PIECRUST magazine, and now works in the curatorial department at Pulitzer Arts Foundation. In May she curated Museum Blue’s end-of-season show, threshole. Her first show for G-CADD, Everyone carries their own idea of north within them, opens this Saturday at Insurance (1822 State), with additional work at Launchpad next door.
For her first show in her one-year residency, Baker asked five artists—Stan Chisholm, Carla Fisher Schwartz, Amy Reidel, Rafael E. Vera, and Robert Long—to respond to the idea of north.
“In our culture, everything is relative to north,” she says. “When we read a map, north is identified first; everything falls into place around that. But because of its inherent relativity, anything can be “north”. My relationship to Granite City certainly felt relative to my being an inhabitant of St. Louis, and I needed to better understand this landscape I plan to be working in throughout the year. North has these mythological and literary associations, these ideas of imagined places and faraway arctic landscapes, but also very specific political associations related to the divisions between north and south in the US. I’m thinking about how divisions between north and south relate to St. Louis, and to Chicago (where I am from), a city that has a similar problem with stories about north and south—just geographically inverted.”
Three artists will show inside Insurance, one will have an outdoor sculpture at Launchpad (where there will also be a video screening at 8 p.m.) and one artist is contributing to a limited-edition publication. At Insurance, Amy Reidel is creating a floor painting with sand and glitter. “It’s like a traditional meditative sand painting, but it uses the imagery she uses in her work—radar maps of storm systems as stand-ins for emotional landscapes, replacing the body, and in turn projecting emotion onto landscape,” Baker says. “She’s using this method of meditative repetition to create the painting, but the image is the chaos of the storm.”
Chicago artist Carla Fisher Schwartz, whose practice includes printmaking, drawings, and small sculpture, will show work related to Sandy Island, a ghost island in the Coral Sea, just east of Australia. “It was included in maps and charts as early as the 19th century,” Baker says. “Then in 2012, it became “undiscovered”—people realized that Sandy Island had been tricking mapmakers for centuries, and it was finally confirmed that it was a non-existent entity. Carla is using imagery grabbed from Google Maps and other sources to re-create Sandy Island. So it’s an interesting relation between physical space and virtual space, what’s real and what’s imagined, what can be created from repeating information over time.”
Stan Chisholm will actually be re-imagining a piece that Baker was very struck by, a sculpture/text piece, Waiting For a Mountain. “It was text that was leaning up against pieces of asphalt,” Baker says. “He’ll be using that text to create a new video projection, and in the gallery he’ll have two wall sculptures, what I would call cumulative landscapes—combined representations of automobile parts, fragments of architecture, and debris from the street, crumpled together to create one abstract form…Stan says it’s about illustrating the infinite, and the condensed forms seem to depict folded space. It’s a graphic abstraction that makes the viewer apply their own story to the piece.”
Next door to Insurance is Launchpad, an empty lot equipped with church pews, a screen for video work, and a dedicated stage for public sculpture works. That’s where Vera, who is based in Chicago and originally from Venezuela, will show a new outdoor sculpture made specifically for this exhibit. “It’s made of cinderblocks, sod, and Astroturf,” Baker says. “So there are all these layers…he provided the materials, and then gave me instructions to construct this monument to the American lawn,” Baker laughs. “All of the works in the exhibition reveal methods of repetition and explore how human beings use repetition to create and understand their own histories. Rafael is repeating these two different kinds of grasses, one on top of the other, where it looks like one layer is protecting the other. The work brings up questions of authenticity and what is real, and conjures phrases such as, “things going south” and “going to where the grass is greener” …with all the positive or negative associations attached to those figures of speech.”
Brooklyn artist Robert Long—who used to live in St. Louis—is also doing a work that contemplates landscape, but it will be presented within a limited-edition ’zine of only 30 copies.
“He actually had a public sculpture in Granite City,” Baker says, a steel sculpture of a meteorite that he purported had landed in Granite. “He’s an artist who remixes historical and sci-fi narratives. He’s research-based, but it’s never clear what’s true and what’s myth. He purposely doesn’t make that clear, so the audience has to decide what’s true.
“He has a process of making drawings of landscapes that are pixelated, abstracted through the use of graph paper. So I asked him to create drawings of landscapes in Granite City.” The initial idea was for Baker to photograph the meteorite sculpture, but when she discovered it was no longer on display, asked Long to give her places to visit and photograph—he would act as a sort of virtual tour guide of Granite City and she would provide images for him to work from. Baker attached a GoPro to her rear-view mirror, and filmed herself driving around to several sites in and near Granite City, which will be part of the video screening planned for the opening reception.
All five artists have created video projections, which will be screened in partnership with Transversal Project at 8 p.m. after a presentation of Glenn Gould’s “The Solitude Trilogy.” That radio program was one of the inspirations for the show; Baker says the name of the exhibition came from a phrase that Peter Davidson repeats several times in the introduction to his book, The Idea of North. That title, in turn, came from the first section of Gould’s “Solitude Trilogy” radio broadcast. Baker adds that Gould’s phrase “contrapuntal radio,” which took its name from contrapuntal music, refers to “the relationship between voices that are harmonically interdependent, yet exhibit individual rhythm and contour.” That’s what she’s aiming for with this show, where each artist works within the same loose idea, but using their own very individual practices.
Baker says her show is just one of the things happening this Saturday, too.
“There are a lot of components to this event,” she says. “There are all of these constellated venues, with an exhibition and programming curated by me as well as projects produced by other people.”
In addition to Everyone carries their own idea of north within them, these things will be happening on Saturday:
- Studio Land Art’s Christopher Carl and the Granite City Chronicle, a community-based archival collective, will present “G-CADD: (Di)Vision of Landscape and Memory,” which will take a look a the past and future of State Street, home to G-CADD’s campus.
- The Six Mile Sculpture Works Program of Alfresco Productions will host a live molten iron pour (with safety monitoring by the Granite City Fire Department).
- Chizmo.TV presents “Industrial Fabulism,” including live performances by Mister Ben, Kevin Harris and the Kingston Family Singers and WHSKY JANEToR; a live audio/video installations by Eric Hall; an audio/video installation and DVD release from Janet; and audio/video installations by Kevin Harris, MaxCorp, Darian Wigfall, Luke Herbert, and Chad Eivins.
- A 10-Year Freezer Burn Retrospective, with a comprehensive immersion curated by Mister Ben and a beer garden soundtrack by live pianist Amy Seibert
Everyone carries their own idea of north within them runs through November 14. The opening reception happens October 3 from 7 to 10 p.m.; additional programming throughout the show includes a listening and reading program in partnership with Granite City’s Six Mile Regional Library. G-CADD is located at 1822 State Street. For more information, call 314-565-2223, go to gcadd.org, or visit the Facebook event page here.
