CHICAGO—Volume Gallery is pleased to announce its summer exhibition, Double Time, opening July 9th, from 5-8 PM at 845 West Washington Blvd, Chicago, IL 60607.
Double Time is a group exhibition examining pairs and parallels, featuring Tanya Aguiñiga, James Hyde, Thomas Leinberger, Matthias Merkel Hess, RO/LU, and Anders Ruhwald. Each piece exhibited with its accompanying counterpart, Vol. 36 creates a mirrored-image environment to promote a dialogue between the likeness, in their shared materiality or function, of the works displayed by the artists and designers in the exhibition. From Merkel Hess and Ruhwald’s ceramic objects, to RO/LU’s cabinets, Leinberger’s side tables, and Aguiñiga’s chairs, that portray domestic purposes, Double Time encourages the viewer to consider the condition of duplicity through objects and art that are the same but different.
Tanya Aguiñiga (b. 1978) is a Los Angeles based furniture designer and artist who was raised in Tijuana, Mexico. She holds an MFA in furniture design from Rhode Island School of Design, and is a current faculty member at Otis College of Art and Design. She created various collaborative installations with the Border Arts Workshop, an artists’ group that engages the languages of activism and community-based public art. She recently founded the group, Artists Helping Artisans, through which she helps spread knowledge of craft by collaborating with traditional artisans. Her work has been exhibited from Mexico City to Milan and she was named a United States Artists Target Fellow in the field of Crafts and Traditional Arts.
Reveling in their liminal qualities, her practice produces pieces equally belonging to the worlds of art, design and craft. Steeped in Mexican and American cultures, her bilingual aesthetics and means of making blend traditions specific to each. Aguiñiga’s fibrous objects command investigation through intricate textures, playful forms and atypical and often humble materials. She constructs the objects in Mothering the Form utilizing the same instinctual, visceral nature of raising a child –using craft as a metaphor for nurturing, memory and time.
Abstract painter James Hyde (b. 1958) moved from his native Philadelphia to New York City in the late 70’s to pursue a career as an artist. Today he currently lives and works in Brooklyn. His work ranges from paintings on photographic prints to large-scale installations, photography, and abstract furniture design. Mr. Hyde has lectured as a visiting professor at a number of institutions, including Yale University, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Bard College, and Cooper Union. He is represented by galleries in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, and Copenhagen.
Mr. Hyde has presented solo exhibitions at the Maison de la Culture de Bourges and the Centre d’Art Contemporain d’Ivry, Galerie Fernand Leger/Credeac in France, the San Diego Museum of Art, the Brent Sikkema Gallery and the Weatherspoon Art Museum in North Carolina and the Zwemmer Gallery in London. In 2014 and 2015 he presented over 40 works as part 20-Year Survey as part of the C.Ar.D. festival in Northern Italy and has been honored with a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, among others. Mr. Hyde’s pieces are included in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., the Denver Art Museum, and the Museo Cantonale d’Arte in Lugano, Switzerland.
Thomas Leinberger is a designer based in Chicago, IL. He designs furniture, objects and installations out of his studio in Garfield Park. In 2014 he was included in the CHGO DSGN (Recent Object and Graphic Design) exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center. Recent and ongoing clients include: The Art Institute of Chicago, Corbett vs Dempsey, The Renaissance Society, The Museum of Contemporary Art , Chicago, Rebuild Foundation and The Graham Foundation.
Matthias Merkel Hess (b.1978) originally from Iowa, has lived in Los Angeles since 2002. He received his MFA from UCLA in 2010. Recent shows have included: Oeuvreday, at the James Harris Gallery, Seattle; Hereafter, at the Salon 94 Freemans, New York City and Anvils at ACME in Los Angles.
Best known for remaking plastic vessels and other consumer objects in glazed ceramic, Merkel Hess has expanded beyond copying readymade forms to make organic sculptures influenced by diverse sources including the geometric patterns on milk crates, the early sculptures of Peter Voulkos, and the Marvel character and Fantastic Four member, The Thing. Less literal than his previous work, the duality of sculpture/vessel, animate/inanimate, figure/ground allows Merkel Hess to further free the medium of ceramics from its constraints of tradition and definition by working within and reveling in the possibilities offered by the medium.
Anders Ruhwald (b.1974, Denmark) lives and works at Cranbrook Academy of Art outside of Detroit. He graduated from the Royal College of Art in London in 2005. Ruhwald has had more than 20 solo exhibitions in the last 10 years in museums and galleries around the world including Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (UK), The Museum of Art and Design (Denmark) and the Cranbrook Art Museum (USA). During the same time his work has been shown in more that 80 group shows at venues like Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), Fondation d’entreprise Richard (Paris), Pinakotek der Moderne (Munich), Taipei Yingge Museum (Taiwan) and Kunsthal Charlottenborg (Copenhagen).
His work is represented in over 20 public museum collections including The Victoria and Albert Museum (UK), The Denver Art Museum (USA), The Detroit Institute of Art (USA), Philadelphia Museum of Art (USA), Musée des Arts Décoratifs (France), The National Museum (Sweden), The Museum of Art and Design (Denmark) and Taipei Yingge Museum (Taiwan). In 2011 Ruhwald was awarded the Gold Prize at the Icheon International Biennial in South Korea. He also received a Danish Art Foundation three-year work-stipend in 2010 and the Sotheby’s Prize (UK) at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2007. Reviews include publications the Guardian (UK), Wallpaper (UK), Artforum.com (US), Financial Times and Avenuel (Rep. of S. Korea). Ruhwald has lectured and taught at universities and colleges around Europe and North America since 2006 and has held an associate professorship at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Currently he is the Artist-in-Residence and the Head of the Ceramics Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, USA.
The now defunct RO/LU, rosenlof/lucas, ro/lu was a design and art studio located in Minneapolis, Minnesota, that focused on exploring the relationship between life and its surroundings and the objects and ideas that fill those spaces. They were the 2012 Walker Art Center “Open Field” Artists In Residence and their work has been exhibited internationally. The studio’s practice extended to landscape design, furniture, relational architectural projects, urban planning work and innovative collaborative public art. The studio, ended in 2015, consisted of Matt Olson, Mike Brady, Sammie Warren and Garth Thomson Vieira.
