STEPHANIE BROOKS FOR SYNTAX SEASON
FEATURING OLI WATT
JULY 30 - AUGUST 21, 2016
@ PRINTtEXT
652 E 52nd Street, Indianapolis, IN 46205
Opening Reception: Saturday, July 30, 3-5 pm
Stephanie Brooks works with the visual language and tropes of bureaucratic culture, imbuing seemingly neutral and objective forms with highly personal and emotive content. Sourcing texts from poems, self-help manuals and bureaucratic materials, Brooks reconfigures such language to reveal the varied meanings inherent in them. Taking formal cues from minimalism and conceptual art, Brooks subverts these historically cerebral movements by creating objects that register on a more emotional spectrum, including but not limited to love, fear, sadness and joy.
This exhibition includes screenprints and objects by fellow Chicagoan Oli Watt that investigate the cliché "sex, drugs, rock and roll," positioning such works as romanticized relics of youth culture. Employing fiction and invention in his material investigations, Watt calls attention to the way such tropes are both real and imagined elements of our social and cultural landscape.
Stephanie Brooks is an Assistant Professor in the department of sculpture at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She earned her BFA in1994 from Ohio University; and her MFA in 1997 from The University of Illinois at Chicago. Her gallery affiliations are Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago; and Peter Blum Gallery, NY. Her work has been included in many national and international exhibitions. Her work has been exhibited in The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; Chicago Cultural Center; Rotunda, NY; New Center for Contemporary Art, Louisville; Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art; Gallery 400, Chicago. International Exhibitions include Berlin, Denmark, London, and Vienna. Public commissions from the City of Chicago, the City of Phoenix, AZ, University of Arizona. Her work is included in the public collections of the Whitney Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Microsoft, Phillip Morris/Altria. www.stephaniebrooks.com
Oli Watt received his BFA in 1990 from the University of Florida and his MFA in 1998 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He currently serves as Assistant Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he teaches in the Printmedia Department. Oli has shown his work nationally and internationally including exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Spencer Brownstone Gallery in NYC, the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids, MI, La Band Art Gallery in Los Angeles and Rocket Gallery in London. His work has been discussed in numerous publications including Art on Paper, Art US, the New Art Examiner, Concrete Comedy and Contemporary American Printmakers.
