Hellen Ascoli’s multi-disciplinary approach to art making derives from an active engagement with weaving, movement, listening, and writing to explore the inherently political relationship between body, object, and environment. Working primarily with the back-strap loom—a tool that attaches to the body of its user and to the space in which they are working—Ascoli generates ideas and experiences that are rooted in place, and are therefore contextual and relational. For her first solo museum exhibition, Ascoli presents several new works including a large-scale textile installation in the CAC’s lobby, a site-responsive kinetic wall sculpture, text-based weavings, videos displayed in custom-built furniture, photographs, and sound works. The exhibition’s title, Cien Tierras, which is shared by two bodies of work included therein, is derived from a Spanish expression meaning “one hundred earths”—though tierra can also signify “land,” “ground,” and “world.” Thus “cien tierras” refers to the multiplicities that underpin the practice of weaving and connect it to other forms of recorded knowledge.

Hellen Ascoli: Cien Tierras is supported by the Kaplan Lobby Fund. Additional support is provided by the generous contributors to the CAC Exhibition Fund.

About the Artist:
Hellen Ascoli was born in Guatemala City in 1984. She received her BFA in sculpture from Southern Methodist University, Dallas (2006); and her MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago (2012). Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions including the Bienal de Artes Visuales del Istmo Centroamericano (2014); Bienal de Arte Paiz, Museo de Correos, Guatemala City (2014, 2018, 2020); My Body is Here, Concepción 41, Antigua, Guatemala (2016); One Stone and the Rain, Lawndale Art Center, Houston; Guatemala from 33,000 km: Contemporary Art 1960-present, Museum of Contemporary Art, Santa Barbara (both 2017); To Weave Blue: Poema al tejido, University of Memphis; Stone’s Throw: Arte de Sanación, Arte de Resistencia, The Anderson and Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond (both 2020). Ascoli teaches at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. She currently lives and works in Madison, WI.

artist(s)PressForPractice , Ouecha , Félicia Atkinson, Trisha Baga, Constant Dullaart, Nikita Gale, keyon gaskin, Steffani Jemison, Kahlil Joseph, Klara Lidén, Hanne Lippard, Jesse Ly, Laure Prouvost, Jimmy Robert, Sable Elyse Smith, Christine Sun Kim, Pilvi Takala, Nora Turato

Attentive to the ways in which artists monitor, contemplate, and intervene in societies as they change, Wild Frictions brings together works that reflect some of the anxieties, disruptions, and tensions which arose or intensified during 2020. Using sculpture, text, video, sound, digital media, and performance, the artists in this exhibition apply strategies of interruption and obstruction to a critique of the grand narratives, oppressive systems, and unconscious, sometimes violent, organizing rituals that characterize everyday life. The presented works, though made predominantly prior to the pandemic and social uprisings of the past year, resonate with feelings of disruption, alienation, and loss of control that have accompanied recent and ongoing shutdowns, quarantines, and economic pauses.

A special issue of the periodical The Third Rail offers the opportunity to engage with the exhibition’s themes in print and online. The publication features contributions by many of the participating artists, as well as newly commissioned texts by literary theorist Emily Apter (on the art of impasse), design polymath Prem Krishnamurthy (on “bumpiness”), and curator Legacy Russell (on “digital virality and intimacy”), among others.

Organized by Amara Antilla, Senior Curator, Contemporary Arts Center and guest curator Sandra Teitge, Berlin.

This exhibition is generously supported by the CAC Exhibition Fund. It is made possible in part by The Exhibition Funding Programme of ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen) and the Office for Contemporary Art Norway. Wild Frictions is produced in collaboration with Kunstraum Kreuzberg, Berlin, where an iteration of the exhibition is on view June 25–August 22, 2021.

For nearly a decade, Cincinnati-raised, Brooklyn-based artist Steffani Jemison has been deeply invested in examining the ways knowledge is constructed and legitimized. This interest stems from a fascination with frameworks of interpretation and narration, as well as critical theory, and vernacular traditions, including street acrobatics and vaudeville. She explores these concepts through a practice that encompasses sculpture, video, installation, sound, and fiction writing.

This exhibition brings together two videos, alongside a new suite of kinetic sculptural objects and conceptual drawings on glass that unfold as a series of experiments, reflecting Jemison’s interest in performance and the politics of embodiment. The exhibition centers around a new video, Toss (2021) that captures a gymnast performing a series of task-based actions informed by rhythmic gymnastics and tumbling. Together, the objects, drawings, and videos explore the symbolic, expressive, and material implications of the act of “agitation” and “turning.”

About the Artist
Steffani Jemison was born in 1981 in Berkeley, CA, and raised in Cincinnati. She received her BA from Columbia University (2003) and her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2009). Since 2016, she has been a part of the musical collaborative, Mikrokosmos, with Justin Hicks. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions and special projects at LAXART, Los Angeles (2013); RISD Museum, Providence (2015); Mass MoCA, North Adams, MA; Jeu de Paume, Paris (both 2017); Nottingham Contemporary (2018); and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2019), among others. She has also been included in numerous group exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2012); The Drawing Center, New York, NY (2015); Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and the Whitney Biennial, New York (both 2019). Jemison currently lives and works in Brooklyn.

This exhibition is supported by The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Foundation, New York, Arts Midwest, and Creative Capital, New York. Funding is also provided by Rosemary and Mark Schlachter and the generous contributors to the CAC Exhibition Fund and the WOMXN.
Through August 08, 2021

For nearly a decade, Cincinnati-raised, Brooklyn-based artist Steffani Jemison has been deeply invested in examining the ways knowledge is constructed and legitimized. This interest stems from a fascination with frameworks of interpretation and narration, as well as critical theory, and vernacular traditions, including street acrobatics and vaudeville. She explores these concepts through a practice that encompasses sculpture, video, installation, sound, and fiction writing.

This exhibition brings together two videos, alongside a new suite of kinetic sculptural objects and conceptual drawings on glass that unfold as a series of experiments, reflecting Jemison’s interest in performance and the politics of embodiment. The exhibition centers around a new video, Toss (2021) that captures a gymnast performing a series of task-based actions informed by rhythmic gymnastics and tumbling. Together, the objects, drawings, and videos explore the symbolic, expressive, and material implications of the act of “agitation” and “turning.”

About the Artist
Steffani Jemison was born in 1981 in Berkeley, CA, and raised in Cincinnati. She received her BA from Columbia University (2003) and her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2009). Since 2016, she has been a part of the musical collaborative, Mikrokosmos, with Justin Hicks. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions and special projects at LAXART, Los Angeles (2013); RISD Museum, Providence (2015); Mass MoCA, North Adams, MA; Jeu de Paume, Paris (both 2017); Nottingham Contemporary (2018); and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2019), among others. She has also been included in numerous group exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2012); The Drawing Center, New York, NY (2015); Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and the Whitney Biennial, New York (both 2019). Jemison currently lives and works in Brooklyn.

This exhibition is supported by The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Foundation, New York, Arts Midwest, and Creative Capital, New York. Funding is also provided by Rosemary and Mark Schlachter and the generous contributors to the CAC Exhibition Fund and the WOMXN.

Curated by Julien Robson, Guest Curator

Compelled by a “curiosity to engage contradiction” and an impulse to disrupt “assumptions about spatial relations,” Joan Tanner’s art has developed to encompass many media, including painting, photography, video, sculpture, and installation. In her assemblages and installations, Tanner plays with the makeshift and precarious in such a manner that form unfolds as a reflection on temporality—of development and decay—in ways that seem purposefully unresolved. Preoccupied with ideas of history, impermanence, and inconsistency in her exploration of materials and form, she has created, over five decades, a body of provocative and engaging work that challenges the viewer’s imagination and refuses simple categorization.

FLAW continues Tanner’s professed interest in disjunction and disruption. In this site-specific installation, net-like structures hang from the ceiling, corrugated fiberglass panels disguise corners and wrap around columns, while freestanding elements of cut and painted wood populate the floor. It is an ungainly and unruly assemblage of objects and forms that both embraces and challenges the structure of the gallery. While Tanner’s installation is inspired by Zaha Hadid’s building, it rebels against the formal logic that lies behind the architect’s vision, employing a discordant vocabulary of objects and forms that unfold in an eccentric rhythm around and along the gallery. Adopting an aesthetic of unfinishedness that serves as a foil to the geometric weight of the enclosing architecture, Tanner’s in