NON STNDRD is pleased to present two solo exhibitions by Chicago-based artists: Radiant Pearl by Claire Ashley and Snake in the Grass by Assaf Evron.
These exhibitions will open with a free and public reception on Saturday, April 6, from 3:00 – 6:00 pm, and run through June 1, 2024. NON STNDRD is located on the campus of the National Building Arts Center in Sauget, Illinois.
Radiant Pearl and Snake in the Grass and will occupy two adjacent industrial spaces. These raw, exposed concrete spaces formerly served as casting bunkers on the campus of the Sterling Steel Casting Company, and now as an experimental venue for contemporary art. These spaces, nearly identical in scale and architectural design, are marked by history, time, and exposure to the elements.
Radiant Pearl by Claire Ashley presents inflatable sculpture as the surface for painting to live and breathe, becoming a tattooed skin of sorts, on a kind of hybrid body. Mobility and portability are important considerations in the work, both functionally and conceptually; Radiant Pearl engages NON STNDRD as a site to explore the possibilities of scale shifts, as the work moves from packed cube to expansive room-filling amoebic sculpture. The ephemerality of the object serves as a metaphor for the body – its fragility and vulnerability, and in that realization, its urgent call for attention and demand to be seen.
Scottish born, Chicago-based artist Claire Ashley mines the language of painterly abstraction, monumental sculpture, and slapstick humor to investigate inflatables as painting, sculpture, installation and performance costume. These works have been exhibited nationally and internationally in galleries and museums as site-specific installations, performances and collaborations.
Her work has been featured in Studio International, VICE, Hyperallergic, Artforum, Sculpture Magazine, Art Papers, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Time Out Chicago, Yorkshire Post, and Condé Nast Traveller (European). She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and her BFA from Gray’s School of Art (Aberdeen, Scotland). She teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Department of Contemporary Practices, and the Department of Painting and Drawing.
Snake in the Grass by Assaf Evron will present a set of sculptural interactions and ready-mades that respond to the collection of built environment artifacts housed at the National Building Arts Center, on whose campus NON STNDRD resides. Drawing from the history of art and architecture — and their connection to pagan origins — the exhibition pulls from Durer’s iconic engraving, Melencolia I, and its exploration of failed rationality. Snake in the Grass features imagery of rainbows, stars, rivers, and gazing eyes hanging in the space.
Assaf Evron is an artist and a photographer based in Chicago. His work investigates the nature of vision and the ways in which it reflects in socially constructed structures, where he applies photographic thinking in various two and three-dimensional media. Looking at moments along the histories of modernism, Evron questions the construction of individual and collective identities, immigration (of people, ideas, images) and the representations of democracy.
His work has been exhibited in galleries and museums internationally. Evron holds an MA from The Cohn Institute as well as an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where he currently teaches. In conjunction with his exhibition at NON STNDRD, he is presenting a special architectural intervention project at the Mies van der Rohe-designed Edith Farnsworth House in Plano Illinois.
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NON STNDRD occupies two adjacent spaces on the National Building Arts Center campus that formerly served as steel casting sand bunkers – and now serving as experimental exhibition venues. Exhibiting artists are encouraged to explore an interplay between raw architecture and immediate landscape, contextualized by the history and function of the facility and the surrounding place, geography and terrain. NON STNDRD embraces artistic experimentation and critical inquiry and shines a light on the non-standard and exploratory nature of contemporary art by presenting it in a space that radically and intentionally breaks from traditional exhibition venues.
The National Building Arts Center occupies a sprawling campus that formerly functioned as the Sterling Steel Casting Company, and today serves as a unique, emergent study center housing the nation’s largest and most diversified collection of building artifacts, supported with broad holdings in architecture and allied arts.
Funding for NON STNDRD was provided by The Luminary’s (St. Louis) Futures Fund Regranting Initiative from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.