October 26th – December 7th, Opening Reception October 26th, 6-10pm
And – Cue Winter.
Sparkles, ice. Cascading snowfall. Gentle movement. Taking inspiration from a fantasy winter landscape, Gina Hunt and Allison Lacher have collaborated to develop a site-specific installation for STNDRD. Cue Winter points toward natural phenomena in a way that mimics nature, though clearly synthetic, staged, and idealized.
A theatrical cue is a prompt for action. Hunt and Lacher command the early arrival of a dream-like winter through a large-scale curtain comprised of long, icy, glittery strands that span the length of the STNDRD pole, and traverse a distance on either side to create a billowing plane. Like actual sleet and snowfall, the curtain will obscure the scenery behind it, though natural forces will at times provide a glimpse through it.
Cue Winter awaits a context that may not come to meet it. Once installed, the season will begin to change, but whether or not the transition to an actual snowy landscape takes place is beyond the control of the artists. Cue Winter waits, vigilant, hopeful and fantastically artificial, and subject to the unforeseeable realities of a natural winter.
Gina Hunt creates abstract paintings, sculptures, and site-specific installations as interdisciplinary platforms to research the complexities of vision and the subjectivity of visual experience. A strong fascination with screens as mediators of light has been the focus of her recent work. Long-term research interests involving technologies of imaging through the medium of light, including the history of early photography, optics, and the physiology of vision inform the work.
Gina has recently presented solo exhibitions at The Franklin (Chicago, Illinois), 65Grand (Chicago, Illinois), University Galleries at Illinois State University (Normal, Illinois), and Virginia Commonwealth University (Doha, Qatar), among others. She has participated in recent group shows at Chicago Artist Coalition (Chicago, Illinois), Alan Koppel Gallery (Chicago, Illinois), Cleve Carney Art Gallery (Glen Ellyn, Illinois), Drew University (Madison, New Jersey), Baby Blue Gallery (Chicago, Illinois), Practise (Oak Park, Illinois), DEMO Project (Springfield, Illinois), E. Tay Gallery (New York City, New York), Elmhurst Art Museum (Elmhurst, Illinois), Hoffman LaChance Contemporary (St. Louis, Missouri), Front Room Gallery (Brooklyn, New York), and The Soap Factory (Minneapolis, Minnesota), among others. Hunt was the 2015-2016 Fellow at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar, where she was a practicing artist and faculty member within the Department of Painting and Printmaking and exhibited a solo exhibition of new paintings and sculpture. In 2016, Gina was awarded residencies at Hinge Arts (Fergus Falls, Minnesota) and the Badlands National Park (South Dakota). At both residencies, Hunt focused on creating temporary, site-specific sculptural installations integrated within landscape and architecture. Hunt received an MFA in Painting from Illinois State University (2015), an MA in Painting from Minnesota State University (2012), and a BFA in Painting, Printmaking, and Art History from Minnesota State University (2009). Her work has been featured in reviews and publications such as The Rib (Boston, Massachusetts), Gulf Times (Doha, Qatar), Salt Hill (Syracuse University), and New American Paintings. Hunt currently lives and works in Chicago, Illinois where she is a faculty member within the Drawing, Painting and Printmaking Department at Loyola University Chicago. She has previously held faculty positions at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar, Illinois State University, and Minnesota State University.
Allison Lacher is an artist and curator based in Springfield, Illinois. Subjects from domestic and suburban life — lamps, utensils, windows, kites, dogs — appear frequently in her work. They act as a prism for complex emotional states, the kind that silently shape our experience of everyday settings. Daydreaming, love, discomfort, longing, and fantasy all pervade ordinary life; the work reflects the bracing presence of these forces within the subdued atmosphere of homes, rooms, and neighborhoods.
Her work has been exhibited at venues that include E. TAY Gallery (New York, NY), the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art and CUAC Contemporary (Salt Lake City, UT), PDX Contemporary (Portland, OR), The Luminary and Museum Blue (St. Louis, MO), Roman Susan (Chicago, IL), Ski Club (Milwaukee, WI), Future Tenant of Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, PA), MCAD (Minneapolis, MN), the Terrain Biennial (Oak Park, IL), Center for Contemporary Art (Hammond, LA), Grounds for Sculpture (Hamilton, NJ) and Illinois State University Galleries (Normal, IL). Allison has received artist residency awards from Ox-Bow, ACRE, Spiro Arts, Vermont Studio Center, The Luminary, the Prairie Center of the Arts, and with Signal Fire where she spent time living and working on US/Mexico borderlands. She was a HATCH Projects curatorial resident with the Chicago Artists Coalition and is a previous recipient of the Illinois Arts Council Fellowship Award. Her work has been profiled on Arts Across Illinois (WTTW Chicago PBS), featured in NewCity (Chicago), FLOOR Magazine (London), Temporary Art Review, and in From Here to There published by Princeton Architectural Press. She is a founding member of the artist-owned gallery Monaco in St. Louis. In 2013 she Co-founded DEMO Project, a space for contemporary art in Springfield, and served as Co-director of the space until its demolition in early 2018. She works at the University of Illinois Springfield where she teaches in the Art, Music and Theater department and also serves as the Exhibitions Manager at the UIS Visual Arts Gallery.
