Overlay
Artist and media theorist Victor Burgin, and philosopher and artist D.N. Rodowick (University of Chicago, Department of Cinema and Media Studies) investigate displaced or effaced histories of architecture and urban space in the near South Side of Chicago through the creation of site-specific audiovisual installations.
Opening Reception: Friday November 20, 6-9p
Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, 5701 S. Woodlawn Ave., University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637
Prairie is a new digital projection work by Victor Burgin, created as part of Overlay, a Gray Center Mellon Collaborative Fellowship undertaken this year by Burgin and D. N. Rodowick. The exhibition is curated by Jacob Proctor, Curator of Neubauer Collegium Exhibitions.
Overlay focused on the history of “The Mecca” apartment building, built in 1892 and demolished sixty years later as part of the expansion of the Illinois Institute of Design under the plan of Mies van der Rohe, whose Crown Hall now occupies its former site. As in Burgin's recent works, A Place to Read, focused on an Istanbul coffee house by Sedad Haki Eldem, and Mirror Lake, which turns around the Wisconsin “Seth Peterson Cottage” by Frank Lloyd Wright, Prairie responds to specific architectural sites (here, The Mecca and Crown Hall) and explores erased or disappeared cultural histories, real and/or imagined, inscribed in the built environment.