Lived spaces are not just pieces of architecture; they are anthropological tools to explore history, memory, and even human behavior. Over time, the relationship between homes and their occupants changes through structural additions or functional shifts. Rathin Barman: Unsettled Structures emerges from many such stories of the restructuring of domestic space. In particular, the artist considers the legacy of colonial mansions in the artist’s hometown of Kolkata, India. These grand, luxurious buildings have been repopulated over time by migrants who come to the urban center to escape conflict, climate change, famine, or political unrest. Barman’s sculptures begin with a sense of dwelling borne out of the isolation of the pandemic and in light of ongoing pressures to house the dispossessed across the globe.
Rathin Barman lives and works in Kolkata, India. Barman completed both undergraduate and graduate degrees at Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata; and has been exhibited in select solo exhibitions such as There is Now a Wall (2022), Dimensional Distortion (2020), Experimenter, Kolkata; and Home, and a Home, curated by Suman Gopinath, Singapore Biennale, Singapore (2016). Select group exhibitions include The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT10); Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia; and Deeper within its Silence, curated by Sumakshi Singh, Devi Art Foundation, New Delhi.
Janine Mileaf is executive director and chief curator at The Arts Club of Chicago. She is the author of Please Touch: Dada and Surrealist Objects After the Readymade (University Press of New England, 2010), and coeditor of A Home for Surrealism (University of Chicago Press, 2018) and The Arts Club of Chicago at 100 (University of Chicago Press, 2016).
This exhibition is supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.
Drawing from complex memories and an evolving sense of identity, Brenda Draney (b. 1976, member of Sawridge First Nation, Treaty 8) paints narrative canvases marked by economical brushstrokes and expanses of white space. In Drink from the river, her first solo exhibition in the United States, Draney portrays scenes of daily life, along with those of singular events, that she leaves open-ended or unspecified. The cumulative portrait that emerges references a collective self that encompasses not only her own experience but that of past generations and current community members. Recurring and recognizable motifs of specific figures, pieces of furniture, or architectural features, alongside more generalized joyful and traumatic encounters leave Draney’s oeuvre open to association and to individual connection.
Draney is Cree from Sawridge First Nation, situated by the town of Slave Lake, Alberta, Canada. Her practice is based on her experiences and the relationships formed between her current hometown of Edmonton and the northern community of Slave Lake, where she was raised.
At The Arts Club of Chicago, the exhibition is co-curated by Janine Mileaf, Executive Director and Chief Curator and Jacqueline Kok, Nancy McCain & Bill Morneau Curatorial Fellow at the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, Ontario. The exhibition originated at the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery.
Image: Strange Invitation (2020), oil on canvas
View press materials HERE.
Saturday June 17
Artist Talk: Brenda Draney and Janine Mileaf
1:00 – 2:30 pm
Draney discusses her own associations with Arts Club Executive Director and Chief Curator Janine Mileaf.
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