Karen Reimer Karen Reimer Sea Change Sea Change
Front Cover: Observed Annual Average Lake Level/Projected Lake Levels, from the Shoretime Spaceline series, 2021 Back Cover: Sea Level Change, from the Shoretime Spaceline series, 2021 (detail)
Karen Reimer Sea Change June 26 - August 14, 2021
Essay by Maria Elena Buszek Edited by Staci Boris Photographed by Robert Chase Heishman
This catalogue was published on the occasion of Karen Reimer’s sixth solo exhibition at Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago.
©2021
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Table of Contents Introduction
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Karen Reimer: Sea Change by Maria Elena Buszek
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Installation views
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Artworks
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Bibliographies
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Introduction moniquemeloche is pleased to announce Karen Reimer’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery – Sea Change. For this exhibition, Reimer will present a new body of quilt and textile works, existing at the intersection of the decorative and the linguistic, using data visualizations pulled from the discourses of global climate change. Reimer’s meticulous embroideries confront the enormity of environmental disasters through replicated scientific graphs plotting increasing heat waves and severe droughts, as well as extreme precipitation events, the reality of imminent disaster in its most palatable form. Yet through juxtaposing different visual and cultural languages, the information begins to destabilize, creating graphic puns in the form of pattern, an optical illusion existing between fact and form. The handworked objects present as an ongoing physical meditation on the notion of reuse, utilizing found textiles, a tangible manifestation of an ethic of salvage. Each component has been dyed and redyed, reconfigured and resewn, bringing forth many iterations of its life as material and evoking the potential for plurality of existence. Reimer works to establish something more complex and ambiguous than the traditional and oppositional binaries that ground contemporary culture’s relationship to knowledge and existence, searching continuously for some way to connect the map to the walk. Born from a legacy that prized craftsmanship and the ingenuity of making, Reimer’s work presents a true romance with labor and repetitive action, disrupting linearity in a way that seemingly stops time and catalyzes thought processes through the long-established methods of decorative craft. Nothing is strictly contemplative, each work functions as a living object; while visually resonant, the potential of value through possible functionality is always present. Reimer pushes concept and material, art and labor, prompting the viewer to reflect upon the metrics through which we gauge virtuosity, the conflicting value systems applied to art and to other objects. The resultant work inhabits the gap between intellectual and physical knowledge, and codification of the empirical that now becomes experiential.
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Karen Reimer: Sea Change by Maria Elena Buszek If many of Karen Reimer’s works in Sea Change make you want to run home and hide under the covers, that’s pretty much how she wants it. On several different levels. Most of the pieces in this exhibition were created during the Covid-19 pandemic when the artist—like most of us—was trapped at home: Zoom meetings for human contact, doom-scrolling the media for the news, scrutinizing her suddenly-shrunken environment with fresh eyes. And—again, like most of us—there were pleasures as well as panic in this new existence, which Reimer deftly infuses into this new body of work. The series’ focus on climate change began before the pandemic did. Indeed, several of the (doubly) recycled works in the exhibition began their lives as part of her 2017 Shoretime Spaceline installation at the Hyde Park Art Center, in which she drew attention to the building’s existence on the former site of the Chicago Beach Hotel, built as part of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition on a foundation of sand dredged up from Lake Michigan. The hubris of this man-made “natural attraction,” establishing a disorienting new relationship between land, water, and sky, distance and time, is more disorienting still when one realizes how normalized often precarious sites like these have become across the post-Industrial urban landscape. Reimer’s research of rising tides and drought for this and other works led her toward more information on how rapidly the planet’s water sources and shorelines are changing. Overwhelmed by the almost incomprehensible scale of global climate change, there is a certain solace in the maps, charts, and graphs often enlisted to make sense of it.
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Yet, even these well-intended graphics frequently distort their message with poor design or typography, which can exacerbate viewers’ tendencies to misread or over-interpret them in such a way that suggest patterns or connections where none exist. The latter phenomenon, known as apophenia, intrigues Reimer—as an artist whose primary medium is embroidery using found fabric, in her practice patterns abound. Reimer has addressed her “boundary troubles” (in a 2004 series of the same name) where patterns are concerned, and has built an oeuvre that pointedly problematizes our tendencies to police the divisions between art and craft, making and conceptualism, abstraction and figuration. But, her research into climate change revealed new, more terrifying boundary breaches that she sought to meditate upon and understand in the soul-deep way that the labor-intensive medium of stitching allows, creating stitched “drawings” that reproduce images and graphs of melting ice at the poles and drought predictions for the United States. But, with the onset of the pandemic, as our worlds shrank, Reimer had the realization: “my backyard was the best place to focus,” and the Great Lakes became her subject. Yet the works in Sea Change aren’t merely representations of the facts and figures—indeed, they are just as much about finding a way to represent humanity’s inability to truly process or grasp this information. Reimer’s texts and graphics, while rendered with the astonishing precision of a masterful needlewoman, are laid over swatches and collages of patterned fabric that obscure or manipulate the information placed atop them: temperature changes of the waters around the upper Midwest seem “targeted” in the red cross-hairs of tartan; toxic algae blooms in Lake Erie blend into and hide behind the dappled patterns of impressionistic leaves and trees; pie charts pin-pointing mercury levels and their sources throughout the Great Lakes defy legibility as they merge with polka-dot patterns of identical sizes. The mash-up of the patterns in the fabric and the patterns in the infographics she incorporates into them is meant to explore the tensions between, as Reimer puts it, what we see as “information-carrying” and what is “not information-carrying,” in order to push these ordering systems “to the point where they might break”—a comprehension-shattering experience that might be the only appropriate response to the apocalyptic message they contain.
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Sources of Mercury in Great Lakes Sediment, 2021 (detail)
And yet the friendly, familiar fabrics that serve as their foundation still give us a sense of hope, at the very least, for humanity’s ability to contemplate and act on our part in this crisis. This is particularly evident in the bed-sized quilt compositions derived from the lake- and sky-emulating collage of found fabric first used in the Shoretime Spaceline installation, which she has yet again repurposed. Reimer admits this constant reuse of materials helps ease her concern about even environmental artists’ tendency toward “making more stuff.” But the quilts in the exhibition also serve another, more conceptual notion of reuse that reverses artists’ tendency to “upcycle” functional objects into objects of art as Reimer pointedly turns the works from her elaborate art installation into functional objects, albeit deeply-conceptualized and sumptuously-crafted ones. These works conjure the safety of our beds and invite us to contemplate both the poetic fantasy and the literal possibility of Sleeping Under the Sky/Sleeping Under the Lake in our age of global warming. May we awaken resolved to work toward a world where such visions remain the stuff of dreams, rather than reality.
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Shoreline Spacetime Hyde Park Art Center May 22-August 13, 2016
Outside/In LAXART September 22- Nivember 10, 2019
Installation Views
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Sea Smell The Level of Change, Sunshine, from 2021 the Shoretime Spaceline series, 2021 oil on canvas Embroidery on fabric 48 1/4 94 x 60xin80 x 3 in 121.9 x 203.2 239.4 152.4 xcm 7.6 cm
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Detail
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Great Lakes Towards the Bay and Shores Basin, from Where theReeds Shoretime Grow,Spaceline 2021 series, 2021 oil on canvas Embroidery on fabric 83 x 1/2 102 71 in x 70 x 3 in 210.8 x 177.8 260.4 180.3 xcm 7.6 cm
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Detail
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Observed Annual Average Lake Level/Projected Lake Levels, from the Shoretime Spaceline series, 2021 Embroidery on fabric 32 93 1/2 x 88 x 3 in
Detail
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Sleeping Under the Sky/Sleeping Under the Lake #2, from the Shoretime Spaceline series, 2018-21 Quilt 111 1/2 x 89 x 1 1/2 in 283.2 x 226.1 x 3.8 cm
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Detail
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Average Maximum Temp, 2020 Embroidery on fabric 37 x 27 1/2 in 94 x 69.8 cm
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Detail
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48% surface melt pre 2005 after 2005 90% surface melt, 2019 Embroidery on fabric 36 x 22 3/4 in 91.4 x 57.8 cm
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Detail
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Massive Algae Blooms in Lake Erie, 2020 Embroidery on fabric 31 x 26 1/2 in 78.7 x 67.3 cm
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Detail
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Percent Area for High Plains Drought, 2020 Embroidery on fabric 27 1/4 x 30 1/2 in 69.2 x 77.5 cm
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Sources of Mercury in Great Lakes Sediment, 2020 Embroidery on fabric 24 x 30 3/4 in 61 x 78.1 cm
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Detail
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US Seasonal Drought Outlook, 2019 Embroidery on fabric 21 x 22 1/2 in 53.3 x 57.1 cm
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Detail
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Bibliographies Karen Reimer has a BA from Bethel College, Kansas, near where she grew up, and an MFA from the University of Chicago, the city where she now lives. Her work is rooted equally in the traditions of domestic craft and the traditions of conceptual art. It has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland, Oregon; The Beirut Art Center, Lebanon; Owens Art Gallery, Mt. Allison University, New Brunswick; Gallery 400, University of Illinois, Chicago; and Maryland Institute of Art, Baltimore. She is a recipient of the Artadia and Driehaus Foundation Individual Artist awards, and the Women’s Caucus for Art’s President’s Award. She has also received grants from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, and the Center for Craft, Creativity and Design. Her 2015 monograph Endless, was published by Whitewalls and Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois. Maria Elena Buszek (PhD, Art History, Kansas) is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Colorado, Denver, where she teaches courses on Modern and contemporary art and design history. Her recent publications include the books Pin-Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture (Duke University Press, 2006) and Extra/Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art (Duke, 2011). She has also contributed to scholarly journals such as Art Journal and American Quarterly.
Monique Meloche Gallery is located at 451 N Paulina Street, Chicago, IL 60622 For additional info, visit moniquemeloche.com or email info@moniquemeloche.com
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