Latent Exposure

Curated by Ruth Horwich and Chuck Thurow, Latent Exposure presented six recent graduates of the University of Chicago’s MFA program whose work in painting, sculpture, drawing, installation and photography explored the dream-like territory between form and fetish. The exhibition posed a subtle, yet deliberate seduction away from the rational logic of waking life. Beauty, humor, historical and technical conventions were interweaved to create intricate, closed systems. The work in the show attained its uncanny effect through the meticulous attention to detail shared by all of the artists.

Blanca Lopez used ritual to evoke a recollection of a concept embedded in history and tradition in her paintings. Borrowing from painting traditions of the 17th and 18th-centuries, Stephanie Serpick created haunting still-life’s and portraits. Heather Accurso created precisely rendered drawings of infant female human/animal hybrids to subvert the usual expectations of the beautiful. Robert Mitchell recasted the icon of America’s favorite pastime the baseball bat, to produce effects that ranged from the humorous to the bizarre. Lisa Schwarzbek‘s functional sculptures provided an eerie setting for the fetishized relics they housed. James McManus used indexical casts of his own body parts to create sculptures that exploited the intimate familiarity of bodily experiences. The exhibition also featured a poetry reading with Elizabeth Alexander, Brooke Bergan, Calvin Forbes, Ronne Hartfield, Cin Salach, Susana Sandoval and Reginald Shepherd in the gallery.