Selected Exhibition Views

Indexing the World:  invention, abstraction and dissonance

curated by Andrew Young

The Art Center, Highland Park, Illinois - 2011

​An exhibition conjuring our intricate and elastic relationship to the landscape.
Indexing the World: invention, abstraction and dissonance is an exhibition of six contemporary artists and one early photographer who employ both fictional and representational strategies to describe an intimacy, both present and historical, in our relationship to the landscape. Today, the limits of natural resources, urbanization and climate change are familiar themes that have made the public discourse about the earth specific to our utility and survival in an evolving world. Many artists respond to this with social and geo-political work.  However, what is often displaced in this conversation is who we are in nature, how we see and what defines us from the outside in. There is something lyrical, rhythmic and almost scientific in the distance the artists in this exhibition create, not just in their chosen medium, but by the “inventions” that inhabit their working process. Coupled with this close encounter is a dual, seemingly self-conscious engagement, if not outright challenge, to the romantic notion of the sublime in nature. This is not a dichotomous or turbulent station, rather an evocative point of reflection, or meditation, on just how near or far we are from something essential in our experiential world, something undeniably part of us.  
Participating artists : ​ 
         Wilson "Snowflake" Bentley, Judit Hersko, Kim Keever, David Klamen, John Opera, Timothy van Laar, and Andrew Young.