CHRIS CUELLAR
BRENDAN MEARA
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ACRE PROJECTS
DEC 16 — JAN 14
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On page 40 of ARTnews issue 68.4 a contribution by editor Scott Burton titled Time On Their Hands can be found. The review covers two exhibitions mounted in May of 1969—Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials at Whitney Museum of American Art and Nine Young Artists at Guggenheim Museum. Burton gleans from each an equivocal air surrounding the fleeting nature of any durational encounter, prompted by a common anxiety that, “after it is completed, there is nothing left to quantify." Temporalized platforms develop a dependency upon documentation and archival practice even when centering their own dispositions toward the transient or quotidian. “Not to aspire to an impossible permanence,” Burton concludes, “is at once audacious and humble.”
On December 16, 2012, ACRE Projects presents an exhibition of works by Chris Cuellar and Brendan Meara addressing—widely—practices of archiving the everyday, the material disintegration of archival supports, and the impossibilities of representing temporality. The exhibition is curated by Pat Elifritz and will remain on view through January 14, 2013.
Chris Cuellar (artist, Los Angeles) works with writing, sound, performance, and digital media. He earned an MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2010 and recently completed residencies at ACRE in Steuben, Wisconsin and Summer Forum for Inquiry and Exchange in New Harmony, Indiana. He has made work for the Austin New Music Co-op in Austin, Texas, Ground Floor at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, Illinois, and Diapason Gallery in Brooklyn, New York. He has contributed writing to Art:21 and DINCA. You can find more work on his website (yoursmountain.com), find him on Instagram (@firstperson), follow him on Twitter (@yoursmt), and/or Key Party with him on Facebook.
Brendan Meara was born in 1980 in Fort Scott, Kansas. His conceptually based, itinerant practice incorporates film, photography, sculpture, and installation. Solo and two person exhibitions include Bcc: (with Frank Heath) at Roots and Culture, Chicago, University of the Americas Puebla, Mexico, and Review Incorporated, Kansas City. He received his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2004 and MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2012. He lives and works in Chicago.
Pat Elifritz is a writer and exhibition-maker living in Chicago. He holds positions at the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and the Museum of Contemporary Photography. He curates independently and contributes exhibition reviews to Newcity Art.
ACRE (Artists’ Cooperative Residency and Exhibitions) is a volunteer-run non-profit based in Chicago devoted to employing various systems of support for emerging artists and to creating a generative community of cultural producers. ACRE investigates and institutes models designed to help artists develop, present, and discuss their practices by providing forums for idea exchange, interdisciplinary collaboration, and experimental projects. ACRE enacts its mission primarily through an annual summer residency program in rural southwestern Wisconsin. Throughout the rest of the year, ACRE offers opportunities for exhibition to each of its residents.
Image: Brendan Meara, Fiji Fuji.
