2011-2014
Casa Duno @ Clyde's // Rebirth FEATURING Veronica Bruce
Friday, December 12, 2014 @ 6pm
For its last exhibition, Casa Duno collaborated with Clyde's // Rebirth, a sustainable style boutique and project space in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago, to present recent works from Veronica Bruce's "Intuitive Trainings 2014" series. The show opened on Friday, December 12th as part of Pilsen's monthly 2nd Fridays Gallery Night.
Alex Gartelmann and Jonas Sebura, Enduro, 2012
Revisiting Undomesticated / Design Cloud MOUNT Residency
Friday, October 25 - Thursday, December 19, 2013
Revisiting Undomesticated presented works that situate the home as a point for investigation into the complex relationships that occur between people, objects, and their physical environment.
In 2011, Casa Duno presented its first ever exhibition entitled Undomesticated. The exhibition featured artists who transfigure mundane objects drawn from the domestic sphere in ways that disrupt traditional notions of function and form. Originally, Undomesticated aimed to bring attention to the relationship people have with objects and questioned how the dynamic changes when objects shift from “everyday” to Art and from the home to the gallery. For their MOUNT residency at Design Cloud, Casa Duno presents Revisiting Undomesticated, an exhibition of artists who are pushing the envelope of how contemporary makers navigate these increasingly blurry boundaries.
The works that were highlighted in this exhibition communicate both personal narratives and universal themes of memory and loss, truth and artifice, and intimacy and repair. Revisiting Undomesticated explored the fragility of the physical shelters we call “home” as well as the emotions and memories that are inextricably intertwined.
Conceal / Reveal: an exhibition of time-based work
Saturday, August 17, 2013, 11:00am-4:00pm
The concept for this exhibition was inspired by a 2011 article in the New York Times by Melissa Febos entitled “Look at Me, I’m Crying”, which describes the paradox of finding more privacy in public spaces through anonymity than in intimate spaces where we should be able to reveal our true selves. For this exhibition, Casa Duno showcased works that explore notions of private vs. public through the investigation of public space and spontaneous encounters.
with performances by
Saul Aguirre and Enid Muñoz
Jane Jerardi
Sabri Reed and Marissa Lee Benedict
Hoyun Son and Paul Richter
Eileen Tull
The exhibition took place on the one square block from 11th to Roosevelt, and from State to Wabash, in the South Loop neighborhood of Chicago.
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Amulets and Heirlooms / 2nd Floor Rear 2013
Saturday, February 9, 2013
For the second year, Casa Duno returned to 2nd Floor Rear, a 24-hour festival of alternative and itinerant art spaces, partnering with Reform Objects, a vintage furniture shop in the Logan Square neighborhood of Chicago, to present Amulets and Heirlooms, an exhibition of work by artists Matthew Schlagbaum and Nora Maité Nieves.
Schlagbaum draws from nostalgia, identity, and remnants of the past to examine failed relationships and the precariousness of intimacy. His works are postmortem mementos that investigate the points of no return and serve as reminders of the adage, “Vision in hindsight is 20-20.”
Nieves, too, is motivated by a strong sense of nostalgia, although her emphasis is on places rather than people. A perpetual, unsettling sense of placelessness and an overwhelming desire to belong dominate Nieves’s studio practice. Nieves’s resolve to remedy this discomfort have lead her to create her most recent body of works: decorative elements for the home that aim to combat notions of impermanence through symbolic proprietorship.
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Vitrine: Matthew Schlagbaum, Don't Stop, I'm Almost There
September 20 - October 3, 2012
"Vitrine" was a project concept developed to activate the floor-to-ceiling windows in the Downtown Chicago apartment of Casa Duno curator Sarah Umles. Casa Duno presents Don't Stop, I'm Almost There, a site-specific work by Matthew Schlagbaum for the "Vitrine" project space.
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"Yes" - a short, simple word that functions as an affirmative response to a positive statement or a contradiction to a negative one. It can function as an exclamation of excitement, pleasure, anger, or delight. The intention of the work is to explore this three-letter word’s ambiguously familiar nature when isolated out of context. This work is meant to reflect the elusive nature of happiness, the difficulty of adequately describing or defining it, and the limits of language and modes of classification. The response elicited in the viewer is meant to mimic the internal struggle with happiness that one might feel, specifically the knowledge of what it is you seek compared to the frequency with which it is obtained. It is that frustration, the strong internal desire to capture a fleeting moment, which this work is meant to reflect.
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Cross Sections / West Town Street Lab
June 2012
For the 2012 West Town Street Lab initiative, Casa Duno highlighted two Chicago artists, Brooke Barnett and Veronica Bruce, in Cross Sections, a pop-up exhibition that temporarily transformed a vacant commercial space on Chicago Avenue into a venue for local art. Chosen for their complementary aesthetic qualities, Barnett and Bruce are painters who depart from the traditional medium, venturing away from the two-dimensional and experimenting with materials and object-making. While their works on paper and canvas evoke the gestural characteristics of expressionism and the attention to shape and line of geometric abstraction, other works are reminiscent of the ready-made, with their unusual combinations of everyday materials, like string, plaster, lace, flannel, plastic, and tassels. Cross Sections showcased works that are not polished and clean, but rather self-reflexive and raw, reflecting the messiness of these artists’ creative processes.
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Prescribed Meanings / 2nd Floor Rear, itsa_pony! projects
February 2012
As part of 2nd Floor Rear, a 24-hour festival of alternative and itinerant art spaces, Prescribed Meanings featured artists who examine how we assign meaning to objects, how objects serve as mediators in our interactions with others, and how, through our relationships with things, we begin to understand ourselves and the world around us.
with works by Kayla Anderson, Veronica Bruce, and Adam Farcus
Curators Cameron DuBois and Sarah Umles additionally presented an interactive work entitled O.T.C., in which participants completed a self-evaluation form with tongue-in-cheek ailments—such as "bed head," "ennui," "writer's block" and "road rage"—and in response received a prescription of customized "remedies" with instructions for use.
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Undomesticated / Milwaukee Avenue Arts Festival
July 2011
Undomesticated featured artists who approach everyday objects in ways that disrupt traditional notions of function and form. Undomesticated aimed to bring attention to the relationship people have with objects and how the dynamic changes when the objects shift from “everyday” to art and from the home to the gallery.
with works by Eric Ashcraft, David Fox, Hyeonjung Kim, Tim Noll, and Matthew Schlagbaum
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