Please join us for presentations by Chicago-based designers Grant Gibson of CAMESgibson and Allison Newmeyer and Stewart Hicks, co-founders of the architecture collaborative Design With Company (Dw/Co), whose works are featured in Treatise: Why Write Alone?—the Graham Foundation’s current exhibition and publication project that brings together fourteen young conceptual design offices to explore the architectural treatise as a platform for debate. Recalling his collaboration with T. E. Cames, the influential, yet fictional partner of CAMESgibson, Gibson will discuss the emergence of the memoir as a viable design construct for the contemporary performance-oriented culture, while Newmeyer and Hicks will discuss architecture and learning from the everyday, collage fiction, corn and character.

Grant Gibson is a Chicago-based educator, registered architect, and founding principal of CAMESgibson, Inc.,an architecture and design practice committed to creating environments and objects that are cross-pollinated with common social, political, and economic interests, as well as individual experiences and desires. Gibson received his MArch from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and holds degrees from Purdue University in architectural engineering and construction engineering technology. He is currently clinical assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Design With Company (Dw/Co) is the Chicago-based architectural collaborative of Stewart Hicks and Allison Newmeyer. Dw/Co seeks to transform the world through textual and visual narratives, speculative urban scenarios, installations, and small-scale interactive constructions. Stewart Hicks received his MArch from Princeton University and is currently assistant professor of architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is a fellow of the MacDowell Artist Colony and a recipient ofArchitectural Record's Design Vanguard Award and the Young Architect's Forum Prize. Alison Newmeyer is visiting assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and also teaches at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and the Illinois Institute of Technology. She is a fellow of the MacDowell Artist Colony and is the recipient of architectural awards from the Van Alen Institute and Architizer.

Images (left to right): CAMESgibson, Victory Column of T. E. Cames (detail), 2015. Fabric and foamcore. 204 x 14 x 14 inches. Design with Company, Midwest Culture Sampler (Department of Quantity, Scale, Image),  2015. Three archival inkjet prints. 26 x 11 1/4 inches each.

Karen Reimer, "Endless Set #17-29," 2007. Sewn fabric. 30 x 20 inches. Courtesy the artist and Monique Meloche.

The Graham Foundation Bookshop is pleased to host the launch of Endless,—the first major publication on the work of pioneer craft artist Karen Reimer. Published by Gallery 400 and WhiteWalls, the catalogue not only surveys this innovative artist’s work, but also rethinks the canonical relationship between architecture and craft.

Endless, includes important essays by leading cultural critic Lauren Berlant, architectural critic Penelope Dean, and art historian Judith Russi Kirshner, as well as an interview with the artist by Gallery 400 director Lorelei Stewart. These essays boldly theorize a new relationship of craft to labor and explore how this groundbreaking artist entwines craft, art, and contemporary issues.

Reimer will be signing copies of her new publication, which will be available for purchase in our bookshop. The event will also feature a Q&A with the artist moderated by Lorelei Stewart. Endless is supported by a Craft Research Fund grant from the Center for Craft, Creativity and Design, Inc. and by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Karen Reimer produces work that expansively addresses the larger relationship of craft to modernist and postmodernist cultural aims. For Reimer, craft is a means to explore architectural concerns, minimalist issues, questions of labor, and connotations within the domestic or vernacular. She has had solo exhibitions at Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago; the Rochester Art Center, MN; the Riverside Arts Center, IL; Schopf Gallery, Chicago; and the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago. Her work has been included in group shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Contemporary Craft Museum, Portland, Oregon; and Wallspace Gallery, New York, among others. Reimer is the recipient of an Artadia Individual Artist grant and a Richard A. Driehaus Individual Artist award. Her work has been included in the publications By Hand: The Use of Craft in Contemporary Art (Princeton Architectural Press, 2010); The Object of Labor: Art, Cloth, and Cultural Production (MIT Press, 2007); and Contemporary Textiles (Black Dog Press). She is currently an instructor in Fiber and Material Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Reimer completed a BA at Bethel College, North Newton, KS, and an MFA at the University of Chicago.

As part of a Chicago-wide festival celebrating German composer Mathias Spahlinger’s 70th year, the Graham Foundation will host a performance of three of the composer’s works. Suono Mobile will present his early fünf stücke für zwei klavier (1969) and the explosive octet aussageverweigerung/gegendarstellung (1981), and the Illinois Modern Ensemble and conductor Stephen Andrew Taylor will perform Spahlinger's large ensemble work furioso (1991), along with in nuce (2003/2009) by former Spahlinger protégé Philipp Blume.

This performance is the fourth concert in the Spahlinger festival, a 10-day residency and retrospective of his music and thought. The first of its kind in the States, this festival presents six concerts and a symposium, all free and open to the public, and brings together renowned musicians and scholars from Chicago, New York, Berlin, Zürich, and Basel.

The Illinois Modern Ensemble comprises students dedicated to the performance of contemporary and experimental music. Its repertoire in recent seasons includes works by leading figures such as Steve Reich, George Friedrich Hass, and Augusta Read Thomas, as well as a constant stream of new works by student and faculty composers.

Suono Mobile USA was established in 2012 by saxophonist Nathan Mandel and composer Philipp Blume. As part of the larger Suono Mobile initiative for new music worldwide, Suono Mobile USA is a modular collective, a sort of “think tank,” for presenting and curating modern and new musical works, programs, and art/music initiatives.

Related Links
there is no repetition. Mathias Spahlinger at 70
http://norepetition.tumblr.com/
there is no repetition: complete program
http://norepetition.tumblr.com/completeprogrampdf

On Saturday, February 28th, Jennifer Walshe and Tony Conrad will perform together as Ma La Pert, an improvisational collaboration that blends a wide variety of traditional and non-traditional instruments such as violins, autoharps, drums, vocalizations, found objects, and costumes to generate unique sounds during their live performances.

Jennifer Walshe is a London-based vocalist, composer, and conceptual artist who often works under various identities individually as Grupat, and also with different collaborators across Europe and the US, including Ma La Pert with Tony Conrad and with Tomomi Adachi on the People’s United Telepathic Improvisational Front. Walshe’s work has been exhibited in New York, Dublin, London, and Toronto.

Tony Conrad is an experimental filmmaker, artist, composer and musician based between Brooklyn and Buffalo, NY. He is known for his early pioneering drone-based minimalist music, as well as his involvement in the Theatre of Eternal Music (The Dream Syndicate) and collaborations with numerous filmmakers, artists, and musicians such as John Cale, La Monte Young, Mike Kelley, Marian Zazeela, Jim O’Rourke, Lou Reed, and Walter De Maria. In addition to experimental filmmaking, Conrad has composed numerous audio works for amplified strings, and has more recently focused on examining traditions in Western music and geometry from Pythogoras to the present.

This performance is presented in partnership with Lampo. Founded in 1997, Lampo is a non-profit organization for experimental music and intermedia projects. Visit www.lampo.org for more information.

PLEASE NOTE: RSVP is required, and event entry is on a first-come, first-serve basis. RSVP does not guarantee entry, so please plan to arrive early. Doors will open at 7:30PM.

Please join us for presentations by Chicago-based designer Kyle Reynolds of is-office and Thomas Kelley and Carrie Norman, co-founders of the Chicago and New York-based architecture collaborative Norman Kelley, whose works are featured in “Treatise: Why Write Alone?”—the Graham Foundation’s current exhibition and publication project that brings together fourteen young conceptual design offices to explore the architectural treatise as a platform for debate. Reynolds, Kelley, and Norman will discuss their design practices and recent projects, which include is-office's speculations about urban forms and conditions using generative Photoshopping and the subverting of Google to Norman Kelley's "Wrong" chairs and site-specific drawings which re-examine architecture’s relationship to vision through deceptive optics.

is-office is a Chicago-based design firm specializing in objects, interiors, and buildings. Founded by Kyle Reynolds and Jeff Mikolajewski, the firm leverages the unique agency of physical form to engage issues of culture, urbanism, lifestyle, and iconography indigenous to the modern metropolis. Kyle Reynolds is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee’s School of Architecture and Urban Planning. He received an MArch from Princeton University and a BS in architecture with a certificate in urban planning from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. His work and writing have been published in On Farming: Bracket 1, The SANAA Studios 2006–2008, and Pidgin Magazine, among others. Jeff Mikolajewski is a project designer at Johnston Marklee in Los Angeles. He has lived previously in Shanghai, Milan, Copenhagen, and Chicago, all while working for firms such as Bjarke Ingels Group, Andrew Zago Architect, UrbanLab, and Gensler. He received his MArch from the University of Illinois at Chicago and he holds a BS in architecture from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.

Norman Kelley is the architecture and design collaborative of Carrie Norman and Thomas Kelley, based in New York and Chicago. The firm’s work has been published and exhibited widely, most recently in Log 31: New Ancients and the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale. They are the recipients of the 2014 Architecture League of New York Young Architect’s Prize, and their design work is currently represented by Volume Gallery in Chicago. Thomas Kelley received an MArch from Princeton University and a BArch from the University of Virginia. He is the recipient of the Peter Reyner Banham Fellowship from SUNY Buffalo and the Rome Prize in Architecture from the American Academy in Rome. Kelley is currently a clinical assistant professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Carrie Norman received an MArch from Princeton University and a BArch from the University of Virginia. Norman is a licensed architect and a member of the Architecture League of New York’s Young Architects and Designers Committee. She is currently a senior design associate with SHoP Architects in New York.

Image: View of “Treatise: Why Write Alone?”, 2015, Graham Foundation, Chicago. Photo Matthew Messner.

For more information on the exhibition, Treatise: Why Write Alone?, click here.

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