^Moonwalkers

Moonwalkers is a group exhibition that highlights tensions and revelations found in the body’s relationship to sense and the digital. The body as a site for experience is radically altered by the 21st century’s technology and resultant attitudes. We experience the presence of another’s absence felt globally during remote entanglements made mandatory by the pandemic or the odd bliss of ASMR youtube channels. The body’s actions are quantified in a neoliberal context, for example by Fitbit biometric data collection to become a commodity. Even subject to surveillance by the misuse of Apple’s Geotrackers. The body and the digital are placed in uncomfortable adjacencies. Moonwalkers is an exhibition that presents six artists whose work approaches this peculiar and hypnotic phenomena.

The exhibition will travel or “slide” between Chicago, followed by exhibitions in Kansas City and Berlin. This adjacency is meant to underscore the intelligence and insight of all of the artists’ work in a larger context. As curators, we are interested in each artists’ representation of the sensual or haptic through their craft. Moonwalkers as an exhibition will move across conventional and unconventional mediums in order to highlight a digital touch back on the body. Together, Jonah Criswell, Nicole Mauser, and Mirjam C Wendt have selected six artists whose work is dynamic, unique and possesses at times an unearthly beauty.

Berlin: Mathias Euwer’s work invites us to a reversal of the digital’s glittering distraction that often is frenetic. Euwer’s digital textures require a slowing down of perception and a soothing din of information that itself shifts in barely perceptible rhythms. Mme. Unikat's work as a tattoo artists bring the body as a site for aesthetic response. Unikat’s work reaches through ancient traditions of drawing and body alteration with contemporary notions of collaboration and a challenge to the commodification of the gallery space. Together Euwer and Unikat reverse our relationships to the digital while echoing ancient practices of wonder and attraction.

Chicago: Judith Geichman and Yesenia Bello preface physicality in their work which is presented in the widest possible of conditions. Geichmann’s probing and hypnotic studio practice is the largest scale work that has been selected for Moonwalkers. Bello’s installations and sculptures anticipate the body’s potential and invite potential communion via multiple languages. Together Geichmann and Bello present internal and external vistas of rhythm, presence, and potential.

Kansas City: Caitlin Horsmon and Annie Woodfill are artists based in Kansas City who move across media effortlessly. Horsmon's interest in landscape and the uncanny focuses on the overlooked by way of film, sculpture and installation. Woodfill’s work explores the bipolar relationship between concepts and materials often being presented through objectness and intervention. As a pair these two artists represent a mercurial capacity for meaning making while being both emerging and established artists.

Curated and facilitated by Jonah Criswell (Kansas City), Nicole Mauser (Chicago) and Mirjam C. Wendt (Berlin)

Jonah Criswell’s paintings and drawings record his emotional experiences of living in the early 21st century and as “an animal aware that it will die”. He also collaborates with curators and artists to produce exhibitions, most recently Echoes with Mirjam C. Wendt and All Tomorrow’s Parties with Kelly John Clark. Currently he lives and works in Kansas City and teaches painting and drawing at the Kansas City Art Institute.

Nicole Mauser’s paintings, videos, and installations investigate tensions at play between color fields, materiality and gestural mark making. Recent curatorial endeavors include Both And, Exhibitionisms, and Privates along with collaborator Tobey Albight. Currently, she lives/works in Chicago, is a lecturer in the Department of Visual Art at The University of Chicago and co-founded Space & Time.

Mirjam C. Wendt is a curator based in Berlin. For Wendt, curating is close to its original meaning - curare - to care, protect, preserve. An intensive dialogue between curator and the artist is particularly important during the development of an exhibition. In this way, Wendt creates a relationship between the artwork and the space and thus establishes a connection between the exhibition and the visitors toward developing themes which create new perspectives and stimulate a re-thinking.

This concept was born from a simple urge between Mirjam C. Wendt and Jonah Criswell to bridge the distance between Kansas City and Berlin and to displace the unique stances each artist takes in their studio practice by building formal pairings and relationships. As viewers, we create a conversation between them that acknowledges the difficulty of building connections across context and geopolitics. Yet, there still remains in this gesture a possibility for exchange, discourse and meaning that works to traverse difference. More on their previous Echoes endeavors here: http://www.echoes.international/.