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Artist Talk: Karen Reimer
July 7, 2016 @ 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Please join us on Thursday, July 7 as fiber artist Karen Reimer discusses her site-specific installation, Shoretime Spaceline, which explores the history of Hyde Park Art Center’s current location by creating simple interventions into the building using everyday materials. Once the Chicago Beach Hotel (1892-1927), the site hosted travelers for the 1893 Columbian Exposition and was rumored to contain land enhanced by the developer after dredging sand from the lake and dumping it on shore. Reimer emulates this audacious gesture by filling the gallery floor with over 40 tons of sand to create an immersive installation that harkens to the origins of the site. The installation confuses and conflates time and space, where directions are reversed and present experiences are based on a fictional past.Karen Reimer (b. 1958, Newton, KS) examines the relationships between beauty, value, and meaning by exploiting the tensions between copy and original, object and process, and fine art and domestic craft. She received a Master’s in Fine Art from the University of Chicago and a Bachelor of Art from Bethel College. Reimer is a longtime Chicago artist whose work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in numerous spaces including the Memphis College of Art, Museum of Contemporary Craft (Portland), Kohler Art Center, De Appel Art Center (Amsterdam) and locally at the Chicago Cultural Center and Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago) to name a few. In 2001, Reimer collaborated with Constance Bacon on a large site-specific installation titled Cold Comfort at Hyde Park Art Center’s facility, then located at the former Del Prado Hotel, 5307 Hyde Park Blvd. In Shoreline Spacetime (2016) Reimer reconnects with the previous site, her history and the hotel history on the South Side by repurposing the fabric used to line the 1,200 square foot gallery in that 2001 installation. Karen Reimer is represented by Monique Meloche Gallery.
This event is free and open to the public.
