Disauders & Marorders: Julietta Cheung & Danny Floyd

With Mac Do "*A Glowing Scroll Hovers In Front Of You* Do you approach? >>Yes" in the Milwaukee Ave. Window Gallery

Opening Friday, November 15th 6–9pm

guilt is the cause of more disauders

than history’s most obscene marorders

– EE Cummings

 

In the exhibition “Disauders and Marorders” by Danny Floyd and Julietta Cheung, fabulated identities from the recent and distant past appear in our cultural and political present as Bart Simpson meets the mid-18th to early-20th century’s radicals, menaces, hustlers, fools, and scouts. Cheung and Floyd mediate textual sources through alternating processes of selection and redaction. While pulling from the preexisting or public-facing material, they whittle away details that make the original context fully determined, inviting mystery and contingency and becoming a performance of otherness. Floyd’s paintings navigate both a literal dark space and a space of confusion between agents enmired in emotional conflict. His printed work turns to the page as a space of potential meaning without rushing to what is sensible. The tension between control and incongruence reflects a struggle between mental polarities in a neurotypical-dominated world. Cheung’s project, “The Radicals and Other Personages,” likewise draws attention to ideas of identity. Using an archive of historical American newspapers from the Library of Congress, she unmakes and remakes the newswriting through prints and videos. Cheung uses her source material to examine contemporary notions of national belonging as she places her own embodied immigrant position in dialogue with American history.

Julietta Cheung is a Chicago-based artist. Her prints, photographs, sculptures, and installations have been shown at various venues in the United States and Europe. Her work has also been published by Kenning Editions, tripwire: a journal of poetics, and others. She is an assistant professor of Contemporary Practices at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Danny Floyd is an artist, researcher, curator, and educator based out of Chicago. He is the Exhibitions Director for ACRE and a lecturer of Visual & Critical Studies and Sculpture at SAIC. He founded Ballroom Projects, an artist-run space in Bridgeport, which he ran for four years. He currently co-directs another independent gallery called Adler & Floyd. He has held curatorial residencies with ACRE and Chicago Artists Coalition. He was also awarded the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation Curatorial Fellowship in 2017.