About the Project:

Installation

Artists: Tony Lewis, Bethany Collins, Devin T. Mays, Ellen Rothenberg
May 1–July 14, 2024
Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, University of Chicago
Curated by Dieter Roelstraete
Exhibition website

How much work does it take to make art seem effortless? WORKS BY attempts to answer this question by bringing together four Chicago-based artists who share an interest in the many meanings of “labor.”

The centerpiece of the exhibition is a new graphite floor drawing, produced in situ by Tony Lewis—the labor of its making being the primary attraction until the artwork is completed. Lewis’s floor drawings are made by manually rubbing graphite powder onto large swaths of construction paper, resulting in dark, dust-coated expanses of monochrome gray. These works call attention to the seemingly mindless chore and anti-theater of their production, though there is evidently a mystical element at play in the smudgy void they engender. (Consider the analogous art of the mandala and comparable exercises in monastic focus and absorption.) Upon the exhibition’s conclusion, the floor drawing will be rolled up into a giant paper ball, to be unwrapped in a different context at a later date. Lewis has invited Devin T. Mays to devise a series of performative interventions into his workspace over the first three weeks of the exhibition. These interventions include the phased installation of a sculpture featuring elements of a distinctly workaday nature: pallets collected during the artist’s wanderings around Chicago’s South Side. Erased: (Unrelated), a large photograph by Bethany Collins, will be installed in the lobby until Lewis’s floor piece is completed, when it will be transferred to the gallery. The image captures a cloud of chalk dust released into a black void—the remnants of the word “unrelated,” repeatedly written on a blackboard and then erased. This photograph presages later works centered on the laborious rituals of erasure and loss for which Collins has become well-known. Two new photo pieces by Ellen Rothenberg complete the picture conjured in WORKS BY. One is of a work boot exhibited on the gallery’s east-facing exterior wall. The other, taken during the dismantling of Barbara Kruger’s 2022 retrospective at MoMA, is of a giant lump of crumpled paper that was once a Kruger mural. The latter photo will be mounted on a free-standing wall that will be placed on top of Lewis’s finished floor drawing.

—Dieter Roelstraete, curator

EXHIBITION HISTORY

Ellen Rothenberg: notes on work

The participatory labor of citizenship and the necessity of making invisible labor, visible, are central (pre)occupations of my work. The working body in transit, employing locational devices such as rulers, compasses, and clocks while occupying street corners and moving through the spaces of daily urban life continues to reappear in current work.

Work Metric, the banner of a work boot and ruler, on the east side of the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, is part of that trajectory of implied and realized actions which suggest the possibility of agency, the potential of the working body, the political body, an active, and sometimes disruptive body—always present, always public. 

Chicago > Berlin 

Living and working between two cities, often without a studio, often on the run, has engendered a different way of working. It’s less a studio practice more a roving, living practice. The camera on my phone has become the notational device of choice.

Observation, a continuous looping—random, digressive, private activity - is always in operation. Now it’s the incidental and seemingly inconsequential quick shot, that inflects the work without the usual heavy lifting. It’s an accumulation of moments, pauses, incremental actions, and reconsiderations. The value of the pause, the delay, resisting the demand of production, suggests new possibilities for working both privately and collectively. It's a lighter, reflective, and possibly more sustainable form of labor.

In the gallery, On Break, the large photographic image, which curator Dieter Roelstraete refers to as the ‘Kruger crumple!’ a darkly humorous directive that points to the image of MOMA’s atrium filled with dumpsters, forklifts, ladders, dry mops, and a huge mound of paper, the remains of Barbara Kruger’s Thinking of you I mean me. I mean you. The silence and stillness of the image skews away from the volume and voiced assertions of Kruger’s installation, and tilts towards the invisible labor of the museum workers, now on break, still, even here, out of view.  

Behind On Break, on the back of the architectural support structure, is Workplace, a photograph detailing a small section of an upholstered armchair. Positioned in front of a desk, the chair belonged to the writer Bertolt Brecht.  The photograph was taken at his last live/workspace on Chausseestrasse in Berlin. The woven and repaired fabric worn down by repeated use, his arm rubbing against the chair, from paper to typewriter, from book to cigar, and back again. 

The intimate layering of our work on and around Tony Lewis’s architecturally scaled floor drawing, including Bethany Collins’ powerful photograph, Erased: (Unrelated), or Work Metric attached to the façade of the building, or as in Devin May’s case “Untitled (Unnamed)” existing first as a series of carefully placed wooden pallets on the Neubauer lawn, swiped by student protestors, trashed by the cleanup crew, and remaining only as imprints in the grass. Things keep changing.

Written for the WORKS BY public reception 
May 23, 2024

List of works:

On Break
Ink-jet print, 2023–2024

Workplace
Ink-jet print, 2015

Work Metric
Vinyl banner, 2022–2024

Artists’ Discussion: Tony Lewis, Bethany Collins, Devin T. Mays, Ellen Rothenberg

Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society
June 20, 2024
Discussion transcript | PDF↓

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