CHICAGO, IL – Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Ave., welcomes back artist Karen Reimer for a solo exhibition at the Art Center, “Shoretime Spaceline,” in Gallery 1 May 21 through August 13, 2016. Reimer will create a site-specific installation to explore the history of the Art Center’s current location adjacent to the lakefront. Once the Chicago Beach Hotel, which catered to visitors to the 1893 Columbian Exhibition, the land surrounding the Art Center is rumored to be reclaimed from dredged sand from Lake Michigan. In emulation of this gesture, Reimer will use everyday materials to create simple interventions into the building, including filling the gallery floor with 40 tons of sand. An opening reception for the exhibition will be held Sunday, May 22 at 3 p.m.
More than 200 yards of hand-dyed blue fabric will divide the gallery into parts not visible simultaneously. For visitors who enter the installation on the lower levels, the fabric acts as the blue sky above a sandy beach. From the catwalk above, the fabric, with elaborate stitching, will represent the rippling lake. The installation will confuse and conflate time and space, where directions are reversed and present experiences are based on a fictional past.
Reimer’s installation will be an immersive environment that engages the senses. The installation will also feature a fresh-cut wooden boardwalk hand-milled by artist Bryan Saner from reclaimed South Side trees. These trees once shared time and space with the Chicago Beach Hotel and create a pathway that conceptually combines past and present through materiality. Visitors to the lower level are encouraged to walk off the boardwalk and feel the sand between their toes or relax beneath one of the many umbrellas set up along the way.
According to Allison Peters Quinn, Director of Exhibition & Residency Programs at Hyde Park Art Center, “Karen masterfully transforms rigid architecture or mathematical concepts into tangible structures that we can inhabit and relate to. Her precise selection of found textiles and materials add another layer of history and context to the installation that bend and flip our contemporary understanding of ‘place-making.’”
About Karen Reimer
Karen Reimer received a Master of 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. Karen Reimer is currently represented by Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago.
