BOUNDLESS AND DISORDERLY
The Guild Room
November 17, 2023 to January 27, 2024
Boundless and Disorderly is a two-person exhibition by painter Louise LeBourgeois and textile craft artist Karen Reimer. While their artwork is different formally and materially, both artists explore the horizon line of Lake Michigan, through LeBourgeois’s representational painting and Reimer’s naming and poetic language. Both scrutinize the horizon line, where water meets air, with awareness that it doesn’t actually exist.
The paradox of the horizon is that while it appears to be utterly linear, it in fact denotes the place where we can no longer see over the curve of our planet, the visible but non-existent straight line describing an arc. Even though the horizon that is visible to our human eyes seems to be an indicator of space and distance, it is always indistinct, contingent, and elusive. It is dependent on one’s viewpoint, one’s line of sight, one’s individual eye level, and, making it a metaphor for practically everything, it recedes when you attempt to approach it. In addition, water and air are constantly changing from one to the other via evaporation, transpiration, and precipitation. So not only is the always-far horizon line a visual trick, but the surface plane supposedly stretching toward it, where water meets air, is also an illusion.
In Boundless and Disorderly, both artists explore the imperfection of human perception. LeBourgeois’s paintings of water and sky, created with wet paint now dry, suggest in their stillness the motion of waves and clouds. Reimer implies the horizon line and plane of the earth’s surface while never actually locating them by either representation or mapping.
Click HERE for more information on gallery hours and private appointments.
BOUNDLESS AND DISORDERLY
The Guild Room
November 17, 2023 to January 27, 2024
Boundless and Disorderly is a two-person exhibition by painter Louise LeBourgeois and textile craft artist Karen Reimer. While their artwork is different formally and materially, both artists explore the horizon line of Lake Michigan, through LeBourgeois’s representational painting and Reimer’s naming and poetic language. Both scrutinize the horizon line, where water meets air, with awareness that it doesn’t actually exist.
The paradox of the horizon is that while it appears to be utterly linear, it in fact denotes the place where we can no longer see over the curve of our planet, the visible but non-existent straight line describing an arc. Even though the horizon that is visible to our human eyes seems to be an indicator of space and distance, it is always indistinct, contingent, and elusive. It is dependent on one’s viewpoint, one’s line of sight, one’s individual eye level, and, making it a metaphor for practically everything, it recedes when you attempt to approach it. In addition, water and air are constantly changing from one to the other via evaporation, transpiration, and precipitation. So not only is the always-far horizon line a visual trick, but the surface plane supposedly stretching toward it, where water meets air, is also an illusion.
In Boundless and Disorderly, both artists explore the imperfection of human perception. LeBourgeois’s paintings of water and sky, created with wet paint now dry, suggest in their stillness the motion of waves and clouds. Reimer implies the horizon line and plane of the earth’s surface while never actually locating them by either representation or mapping.
Click HERE for more information on gallery hours and private appointments.
Louise LeBourgeois is a painter, writer, open water swimmer, and open water swim coach. She uses the simple elements of sky, horizon, and water to explore the boundless possibilities of emotional temperature. As the climate crisis escalates, she sees her painting, swimming, and coaching as practices to deepen her own relationship to the natural world, and to assist others in doing the same.
The flux, heft, and ever-changing moods of Lake Michigan inspire her paintings. She is mesmerized by the play of light just above and below the surface of deep water. Using both opaque color and transparent glazes, she builds up layers of paint, sanding between each layer, slightly abrading the surface and eliminating evidence of brushstrokes. The repeated action of accumulation then subtraction of color creates the illusion of depth.
LeBourgeois earned an MFA in Painting from Northwestern University in 1994 and an MFA in Creative Writing-Nonfiction from Columbia College Chicago in 2016. She has exhibited her paintings in galleries throughout the United States and in Italy, Japan, and the Netherlands. Her paintings are in the collections of the Union League Club of Chicago, Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, The University of Chicago Hospitals, Fermilab, Ampersand Art Supply, Indiana University Northwest, as well as several private and corporate collections. She has been awarded grants from Artadia and the Illinois Art Council
She has published her essays in the Chicago Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, and Our America. She lives in Chicago, just a short walk from Lake Michigan.
Karen Reimer has a BA from Bethel College, Kansas, near where she grew up, and an MFA from the University of Chicago, the city where she now lives. Her work is rooted equally in the traditions of domestic craft and the traditions of conceptual art, using their disjunctions to consider the values and assumptions that underlie both. It has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; LAXART, Los Angeles; Salina Art Center, Salina, Kansas; the Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland, Oregon; the Beirut Art Center, Lebanon; Owens Art Gallery, Mt. Allison University, New Brunswick; Gallery 400, University of Illinois, Chicago; Maryland Institute of Art, Baltimore; and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago, which represents her work. She is a recipient of the Artadia and Driehaus Foundation Individual Artist awards, and the Women’s Caucus for Art’s President’s Award. She has also received grants from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, and the Center for Craft, Creativity and Design. Her 2015 monograph Endless, was published by Whitewalls and Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois. Her work is also published in Reprint: Appropriation (&) Literature, Luxbooks Gmbh; The Object of Labor, MIT Press; By Hand, Princeton Architectural Press; and Exchanging Clothes: Habits of Being II, University of Minnesota Press.
Louise LeBourgeois is a painter, writer, open water swimmer, and open water swim coach. She uses the simple elements of sky, horizon, and water to explore the boundless possibilities of emotional temperature. As the climate crisis escalates, she sees her painting, swimming, and coaching as practices to deepen her own relationship to the natural world, and to assist others in doing the same.
The flux, heft, and ever-changing moods of Lake Michigan inspire her paintings. She is mesmerized by the play of light just above and below the surface of deep water. Using both opaque color and transparent glazes, she builds up layers of paint, sanding between each layer, slightly abrading the surface and eliminating evidence of brushstrokes. The repeated action of accumulation then subtraction of color creates the illusion of depth.
LeBourgeois earned an MFA in Painting from Northwestern University in 1994 and an MFA in Creative Writing-Nonfiction from Columbia College Chicago in 2016. She has exhibited her paintings in galleries throughout the United States and in Italy, Japan, and the Netherlands. Her paintings are in the collections of the Union League Club of Chicago, Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, The University of Chicago Hospitals, Fermilab, Ampersand Art Supply, Indiana University Northwest, as well as several private and corporate collections. She has been awarded grants from Artadia and the Illinois Art Council
She has published her essays in the Chicago Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, and Our America. She lives in Chicago, just a short walk from Lake Michigan.
Karen Reimer has a BA from Bethel College, Kansas, near where she grew up, and an MFA from the University of Chicago, the city where she now lives. Her work is rooted equally in the traditions of domestic craft and the traditions of conceptual art, using their disjunctions to consider the values and assumptions that underlie both. It has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; LAXART, Los Angeles; Salina Art Center, Salina, Kansas; the Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland, Oregon; the Beirut Art Center, Lebanon; Owens Art Gallery, Mt. Allison University, New Brunswick; Gallery 400, University of Illinois, Chicago; Maryland Institute of Art, Baltimore; and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago, which represents her work. She is a recipient of the Artadia and Driehaus Foundation Individual Artist awards, and the Women’s Caucus for Art’s President’s Award. She has also received grants from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, and the Center for Craft, Creativity and Design. Her 2015 monograph Endless, was published by Whitewalls and Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois. Her work is also published in Reprint: Appropriation (&) Literature, Luxbooks Gmbh; The Object of Labor, MIT Press; By Hand, Princeton Architectural Press; and Exchanging Clothes: Habits of Being II, University of Minnesota Press.
Art Photography by: Tom Van Eynde
