Artist Talk with Jeff Carter
About the program
Educator, multimedia artist, and CAB 5 participant Jeff Carter details his contribution to the Biennial, Urban Fill.
Learn more about Carter’s ongoing work at the site of the former Michael Reese Hospital, entitled The Singer Pavilion Project, and its engagement with evolving notions about urban development, architectural preservation, and the legacy of Modernist social philosophy.
Urban Fill
In 1945, Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius drew up the master plan for a major expansion of the Michael Reese Hospital, located in Chicago’s historic Bronzeville neighborhood, which included eight new buildings for which he is a collaborator of record. When the hospital closed in 2008, the campus was almost entirely demolished, including seven of the Gropius buildings. The last remaining structure, the Singer Pavilion, has since been suspended between erasure and rehabilitation. Depicting the building in its current state as little more than a garbage-filled shell, this project suggests that architecture is a discipline of continuous rehearsal; it is the modelling of ideals rather than objects, and their success or failure is due not only to architects but to policymakers, institutions, and the public as well.
Venue
View moreChicago Cultural Center
Address
78 East Washington Street, Chicago, IL
Neighborhood
The Loop
Description
The Chicago Cultural Center serves as one of the main exhibition venue sites for CAB 5, featuring projects from more than 80 participants from ten countries.
Opened in 1897, the Chicago Cultural Center is a Chicago landmark building operated by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events and is home to free cultural exhibits and programming year-round.
Participant
View moreJeff Carter
Chicago, United States
WebsiteJeff Carter (b. 1967, California, USA) is a multimedia artist who approaches his practice as a process of negotiation, using sculpture, kinetics, sound, and digital media to explore the intersections of place, memory, history, and the built environment. In several recent projects Jeff has used IKEA products as “raw” material to reinterpret and recontextualize lost works of early Modern sculpture and architecture. Jeff has exhibited his work in Chicago at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Renaissance Society, and the Hyde Park Art Center. His work has been shown internationally at the Hayward Gallery, London; the Kunsthalle Hamburg, Germany; the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan; the IKEA Museum, Sweden; and the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, University College Cork, Ireland. His solo shows include the Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago; Spencer Brownstone Gallery, New York; and Galeria Valle Orti, Valencia, Spain. His work was reviewed in Art in America and profiled in the 7th edition of Bauhaus Magazine. Carter earned his BFA at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and his MFA at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He lives and works in Chicago, where he is a professor in The Art School at DePaul University.