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No End in Sight From December 13, 2008 to January 10, 2009 Exhibition Reception: Friday, December 12, 4:30 p.m. Performance of ks rives and Nicole Kenney’s Before I Die I Want To… Public Event: Saturday, December 13, 2 p.m. Folding party and “Infinite Change” panel discussion Sullivan Galleries Tuesday-Saturday 11 a.m. – 6 p.m. Sullivan Galleries, 33 S. State Street, 7th Floor 312.629.6635 |
Biography Marie Krane Bergman leads, with others, a fluid theory-practice collective named Cream Co. The group formed in 1997 among painting students at the School of the Art Institute and produces paintings, photographs and installations that raise questions about ways we make meaning. In 2000, the group took over Bergman's construction of paintings that address the nature of being in time. Bergman has participated in solo and group exhibitions in North America and Europe, including shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), the Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago), and Rijks Academie (Netherlands). Her work was featured this past summer at the Art Institute of Chicago in a Theory Institute co-organized by James Elkins and Gottfried Boehm. In March, 2009, her work will be the subject of a solo exhibition at the Herron Galleries at Indiana University in Indianapolis. Bergman's art is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and numerous private collections and has been frequently reviewed and included in numerous essays and texts, including James Elkins' "Six Stories from the End of Representation", Stanford University Press, 2008. Statement regarding painting practiceThe essential goal of our artistic practice is to address ways human perception and memory reveal the nature of being in time. We create objects and situations that address time’s constant, immutable presence, and its barely discernible nature. Based on Bergman's direct observation of the colors of wilting flowers over the course of many years, we present pictures of what we imagine time looks like. The paintings represent qualities of time such as the experience that time renders itself visible when the incremental changes wrought by it become apparent. Ultimately, the enigmatic works operate as monuments to human presence and perception. Ideally, they operate as clocks: things a viewer can use to measure his or her relationship to the world. Selected Artist Statements regarding painting 2007 To clarify a few ideas about my multi-monochrome paintings: the new works are not optical in a tricky way, nor optical in a way that excludes the possibility of meaning. (The opticality of each piece is not inherent, nor dizzying; the thing and the image it presents is certain and immutable; however, a viewer can see the thing differently; it is thus a matte- not reflective- monochrome from every distant angle; however one may see it as an orange-like monochrome at one time and a blue-like monochrome at another time. A close inspection reveals that the work is not a monochrome, nor a field.) And, although each painting is based on a "pattern", the pattern is merely a means of solving a problem about specificity and representation, and a way of translating essentially non-verbal ideas into action. Often, the pattern changes at every line (and sometimes at every mark), in order to make the painting more specific and more representational. Ultimately, we can see/read/explain multi-monochrome paintings as representations of (or questions about) unnamable, yet specific, experiences of being in time, of human presence and memory. Paintings that represent pictures of things (illustrative paintings) do not operate in a similar way. My paintings propose the possibility that with specificity a thing can operate as a (fluid) representation that a viewer can use to make meaning. Like a clock. 2006 The essential goal of my current project is to make paintings that present what time looks like and operate like clocks (for the future) by enabling a viewer to measure his or her relationship to the world. 2005 We are primarily painters interested in cultivating radical ideas about painting and the role of art in culture, the essential goal of our artistic practice is to raise questions about the ways we use art (and things) to make meaning out of life. 2003 My paintings, titles and objects address ways we make meaning out of our lives by marking time and by trying to connect with others when faced with the impossibility of real communication. 2001 My large-scale paintings consist of thousands of individual yet repetitive marks and, on one level, each mark operates as a quiet and certain record of human presence and perception. On another level, notwithstanding the specificity of the marks and the object, the paintings resist becoming images and operate as constant reminders that nothing is present. With some paintings, as the conditions surrounding a painting change (through lighting or a viewer’s orientation), the appearance of the painting changes and, thus, the painting operates as a “clock” or a measure of the space it inhabits. A note about authorship
Solo/Cream Co.* and Group Exhibitions (selected) Public Collections Albright-Knox Art Gallery Bibliography (selected) 2008 Awards and Related Experience 2008 Artadia Award finalist. Websites creamco.net |
