VISUAL ARTS

Opening Reception: January 13, 2011 7pm – 9pm
Artist Talk: January 13, 2011 8pm

Chicago-based artist Jeroen Nelemans’s solo exhibition Live Feed-ing explores how changes in perception and scale can uncover interrelationships between natural and artificial systems. Comprised of a site-specific and a video installation, both works on view measure and evaluate how cyclical progressions coexist in natural and artificial systems, and how new relationships can be formed when intertwined or placed within different contexts.

Animate objects become inanimate and visa versa in the work Live Feed-ing, 2006, as two display cases are placed within a larger display case, one containing a working fish tank and the other featuring a monitor display of live video camera feed footage highlighting a specific zoomed-in view into the neighboring aquatic environment.

The role of space and time within natural and artificial orders is further mined and undermined in
Six Feet Above, 2010, (pictured above) in which a large plane of Astroturf, suspended six feet above the ground, bisects the exhibition space. When seen from below, a vast network of roots weaving in and out from underneath this plane is exposed, while the placement of a central opening and a wooden pedestal allow to viewer to perch above this “floating carpet” and discover that actual grass is growing inside.

Born in the Netherlands, Nelemans works predominantly in video along with a variety of other media to explore the relationship between perception, the landscape, and the moving image. According to artist, “These investigations stem from the artificial quality of my native Dutch landscape and the concepts of image making during the Golden Age in the Netherlands.”

Nelemans has shown extensively in national and in international venues, most recently at the ICA in Philadelphia, PA (2010), the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessalonika, Greece (2010), Ebersmoore Gallery, Chicago, IL (2010), the Nice&Fit Gallery Berlin, Germany (2009), the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts in Grand Rapids, MI (2008), Leonard Tachmes Gallery, Miami FL (2007), Art Miami (2007), and the Frost Art Museum, Miami, FL (2004). He has also recently collaborated with Anne Wilson on her video: Walking the Warp, which was part of a group show at the Triennale Design Museum in Milan, Italy, the Knoxville Art Museum, TN, and Contemporary Art Museum in Houston, TX (2009-10.)