2.7°

January 26—March 9, 2019

Carrie Secrist Gallery is pleased to announce 2.7°, a group exhibition featuring five artists investigating the variegations of climate change and the implications of weather on humanity. This exhibition opens January 26 and will be on view through March 9, 2019 with an opening on January 26 from 5 – 8PM.

Artists included:

Cynthia Daignault
Justin Brice Guariglia
Allison Janae Hamilton
Christine Tarkowski
Margo Wolowiec

“‘no documented historic precedent.’” – The New York Times*

In October 2018 the New York Times broke the news of an astounding, globally impacting report by the IPCC (The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). 2.7°F was announced as the new global rise in temperature degrees that will be reached by the year 2040. This counters previous research that predicted the Earth would see catastrophic consequences from climate change in the next 100 years with a global rise in temperatures by 3.6°F. As such, scientists predict that if changes to our industry and energy production are not made immediately, in twenty-one years, the Earth and all of its residents will experience life-threatening results. This news galvanized an already dire issue, making it pressing not just to scientists and lovers of green energy. This urgency is felt across all paths, all fields, including the arts.

2.7° contextualizes a variety of artists processes, approaches and attitudes towards the environment around them. It is through the interpretation and examination of data visualization, social dynamics and the earth’s alchemic power, which the artwork on display here hints at, cajoles and forces the implications for us. The inevitability of dramatic change to our environment is denied by some and overlooked by others. Similar to the way scientists compound this important information with time stamps (2040) and numerical degree change (2.7°F or 1.5°C), the cumulative effect of a group of artists aestheticizing the consequences serves as a new alternative form of documentation.

Cynthia Daignault’s formal painting is a tongue in cheek simulacrum of the way we experience, view and perhaps unconsciously distance ourselves from Nature. The implication here is from the viewer’s perspective: we must ask ourselves how we can preserve and protect the environment while also asking what is lost and gained in that preservation.

Justin Brice Guariglia’s blunt text-based works combine simple statements with abstract representations of our shifting environs, which compound the sublime beauty of loss. A neon-based artwork hung in the front window of the gallery shouts an advertisement for the ages while additional artworks use a metal substrate for more warnings that are enhanced with entrancing imagery.

Allison Janae Hamilton founds her practice in her childhood and family homes in the rural South. Her magical and mystical photo-based images bring together her personal history with the land, and point to larger issues of how power and race differentiate the socio-economic impact of those who live most closely with the land.

Christine Tarkowski’s sculptures and textile-based work challenge viewers to look deeply at a fundamental level at what it means to both construct, and deconstruct. An ominous cloak of fabric paired with glass and metal forms that are constructed and then deconstructed with the artist’s own hand, are prescient. Chance and intention blend, merging and separating, as do the concepts of systems in decline, the dissolution of order, activated through processes of alchemical invention and the willful destruction of exposed systems of knowledge.

Margo Wolowiec’s series of handwoven tapestries featuring images of catastrophic weather and the subsequent media and social media hype that have become part and parcel of how we experience weather.  Distorted screenshots, weather maps, and other imagery call to mind the chaotic experience leading up to a weather event, and simultaneously call into question the motives of such exposure, leading us to ask, does the hype help or harm? 

*“’A landmark report from the United Nations’ scientific panel on climate change paints a far more dire picture of the immediate consequences of climate change than previously thought and says that avoiding the damage requires transforming the world economy at a speed and scale that has ‘no documented historic precedent.’” – Coral Davenport, The New York Times, Oct. 7, 2018

ARTISTS BIOGRAPHIES

Cynthia Daignault (b. Baltimore, Maryland, lives and works in New York and Los Angeles) attended Stanford University, was a MacDowell Colony Fellow and a recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant. Her paintings have been the subject of numerous solo shows, including exhibitions at White Columns, FLAG Art Foundation and Rowhouse Project; as well as numerous group shows, including exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of art, MASS MoCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, the Fort Worth Modern, and the Brooklyn Museum. Daignault is an active writer. She is the founder of the publication A-Z, an editor of the Sean Landers monograph and the former associate director of the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation.

Justin Brice Guariglia (b. 1974, New Jersey, lives and works in New York City, NY) studied Italian art history and literature in Casa Artom, Venice, under the late art historian Terisio Pignatti, before moving to Beijing to study Chinese language, culture, and history at Capital Normal University. He then returned to the USA to finish his degree at the liberal arts college Wake Forest. The work of Guariglia belongs to several museum collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Norton Museum of Art, Florida; the Spurlock Museum, Illinois; and the Vanden Heuvel Collection, New York. His photographs have been published in Smithsonian, The New York Times and National Geographic.

Allison Janae Hamilton (b. 1984, Kentucky, lives and works in New York City) has exhibited at museums and institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY); MASS MoCA (North Adams, MA); Storm King Art Center (New Windsor, NY); the Studio Museum in Harlem (New York, NY); the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery (Washington, DC); the Jewish Museum (New York, NY); Fundación Botín (Santander, Spain); and the Tacoma Art Museum (Tacoma, WA).  Her work has appeared in the Brighton Photo Biennial and Istanbul Design Biennial. She was a 2013-2014 Fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program, sponsored by the Whitney Museum of American Art.  Hamilton has been awarded artist residencies at the Studio Museum in Harlem (New York, NY); Recess (New York, NY); and Fundación Botín (Santander, Spain). She received her PhD in American Studies at New York University and her MFA in Visual Arts at Columbia University. Hamilton’s first museum solo exhibition, Allison Janae Hamilton: Pitch, is currently on view at MASS MoCA through February 2019.

Christine Tarkowski’s (Chicago) solo exhibitions include ‘Whale Oil, Slave Ships & Burning Martyrs’ at Priska Juschka Fine Art in New York, Imitatio Dei at the Museum of Contemporary in Chicago and Last Things Will Be First And First Things Will Be Last at the Chicago Cultural Center. She has been included in exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Socrates Sculpture Park, Cooper-Hewitt National Museum of Design, RISD Museum, and The Renaissance Society in Chicago. She has created commissioned projects for the Manilow Sculpture Park at Governor’s State University, Mass MoCA, Public Art/City of Chicago, and Franconia Sculpture Park. She currently is an Associate Professor in the Fiber and Material Studies Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has been the recipient of grants from the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, the Creative Capital Foundation, the Illinois Arts Council and the Stone Belic Institute for the Study of Women and Gender in the Arts and Media and been awarded residencies at the Cite Internationale des Arts, Paris and the J.M. Kohler Arts in Industry.

Margo Wolowiec (b. 1985, Dearborn, MI, lives and works in Detroit) has work is in the public collections of the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), San Jose Museum of Art (San Jose), Kadist Art Foundation (San Francisco), and the Detroit Center for Photography. It has been included in solo exhibitions at Jessica Silverman Gallery (San Francisco), Laura Bartlett Gallery (London) and Lisa Cooley Gallery (New York). Recent group exhibitions include the Museum of Craft and Design (San Francisco), di Rosa Foundation (Napa), National Gallery of Kosovo (Kosovo), and the Center for Performance Research (Brooklyn). She was a panelist for the “Material Concerns and Current Practices” series at the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation in New York (February 2017) and has lectured at Maryland Institute of Art, San Francisco State University, and Eastern Michigan University. Wolowiec received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from the California College of the Arts.