WITNESS
Stacia Yeapanis presented by Nowhere Room
MARCH 6–31 2017
Nowhere Room presents Witness, an evolving improvisational installation by Stacia Yeapanis at The Stolbun Collection. Throughout March, Yeapanis will fill The Stolbun Collection with an unnatural landscape using thousands of small elements, meticulously created through repetitive gestures. Each week the work will grow and morph as she arranges and rearranges the pieces. In addition to the artist’s changes, the curators and the owner of the space, Seth Stolbun, will have agency to manipulate the elements as they wish.
Like much of Yeapanis’ work, this installation is site-responsive. The Stolbun Collection is a small gallery tucked away on the 15th floor of a downtown Chicago office building and is only accessible to a small group of key holders. As such, this particular installation is built for viewers, not visitors. Unlike Yeapanis' previous installations, which depend on bodily experience as a significant part of seeing, Witness highlights what's lost when the body is not present. Witness combines constant accessibility with the limitations of a fixed, remote point of view all—via the internet. Viewers can watch the installation 24 hours a day via the live feed from the Nest camera starting March 6th.
Yeapanis consciously surrenders control by allowing the view to be entirely controlled by the curators and Stolbun, who will also make different 360 close-up views of the installation available each week. The circumstances of the exhibition highlight dual unidirectional perspectives: as Yeapanis witnesses and responds to the space, an unknown public witnesses her actions. At its core, the exhibition is an exercise in how we consume the world around us, questioning what it means to bear witness to an event, a space and the present moment.
Tune in for upcoming exhibition events here (scroll down to see live video feed).
Additional events will occur on random days and times, so please check back often.
Opening Event, installation begins: March 6th at 12pm
Artist installation in space: March 6th, beginning at noon and subsequently starting at noon on the following dates: March 8, 10, 13, 15, 20, 22, 24, 27, 29
Curatorial interventions to take place: March 10th at 12pm; March 18th at 11am; March 23rd at 2pm; March 29th at 10am
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Stacia Yeapanis is a Chicago-based, interdisciplinary artist, educator and writer. Influenced by existential philosophy and mindfulness meditation, she explores desire and impermanence through the portal of repetition in her cross-stitch embroideries, remix videos and temporary, collage installations. All the conscious and unconscious repeated gestures we make as human beings are a lived engagement with the fact of existence: we are here now, but someday we won’t be. Responding to that fact with wonder and play, as opposed to anxiety, her recent sculptural “landscapes” are improvised on the floor from thousands of handmade and collected parts and only last the length of each exhibition.
Stacia is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where received her MFA in 2006, and was a 2011-2012 Artist-in-Residence and a 2012-2013 Mentor-in-Residence at Chicago Artists’ Coalition’s BOLT Residency at in Chicago. She conducts weekly interviews with artists for the OtherPeoplesPixels blog. Her solo exhibitions include shows at Siena Heights University (2013), Heaven Gallery (2014) and the Annex Gallery at Lillstreet Art Center (2014). She created site-responsive installations for Form Unbound (2015) at Dominican University, SENTIENCE (2016) at The Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art. Resist the Urge to Press Forward (2017), a two-person show with Brent Fogt, is on view at Riverside Art Center (Riverside, Illinois) from March 5 - April 15.
Nowhere Room is a curatorial collaboration between MK Meador and Olivia Junell exploring site specific exhibition-making and experimental presentations of art. To keep up with current projects, please visit our website.
MK Meador is an independent curator and writer. She is completing her graduate studies in Curatorial Practice at the California College of Art. Previously, she was on the curatorial panel at the multidisciplinary arts space, Comfort Station and was curatorial resident with the Chicago Artists Coalition. She has organized shows for A+D Gallery, Design Harvest, Milwaukee Avenue Arts Festival. Upcoming projects include organizing artists projects in Chicago and San Francisco.
Olivia Junell is the Development and Outreach Director at Experimental Sound Studio and the Managing Director of the Hyde Park Jazz Festival. A native Texas, Olivia moved to Chicago in 2013 to pursue a dual Masters in Arts Administration and Modern Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute Chicago. Since moving to Chicago she has worked with a wide-range of organizations including Honey Pot Performance, the Roger Brown Study Collection, Elastic Arts Foundation, Cacophony Magazine, and High Concept Labs.