Kendell Carter
Liberation Summer
May 21 – July 30, 2011
Opening reception for the artist Saturday, May 21st, 4-7pm

For his long awaited second solo exhibition at moniquemeloche, Kendell Carter says “I am looking to the formal abstraction of casual cultural signifiers and as a means of liberating a traditional knee-jerk discourse that is often centered in Subjective Blackness VS. Objective Mark Making. I am not rejecting identity, I am simply prioritizing and normalizing mark making. I am looking for the liberated nature of a postmodern American artwork via abstraction.”

Carter continues his series Untitled Relationships – multi-part works of collaged mass-produced materials, drawings, spray paint, and glitter – inviting viewers to define their own relationships between casual and formal elements.  He positions fetishized objects like fat shoelaces, track pants, or Timberlands as the new materials of postmodern pastiche. Referencing iconic moments in modernist art and design, Carter turns contemporary culture on itself, empowering these common materials to surpass their casual status.  In his new densely layered paintings, Carter’s formal treatment of paint (pouring, peeling, sculpting, weaving, gluing, nailing, etc) pushes the physical limits of the “flat” medium. Though Carter’s abstracts are aesthetically formal his use of casual signifiers to make marks breaks with modernist theory by conflating the subjective and objective nature of materials.

Kendell Carter (American, born New Orleans 1970, lives Long Beach, CA) has an MFA from California State University in Long Beach, an Environmental Design BA from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, and a BFA from the Atlanta College of Art. Carter has had exhibitions at institutions including the Savannah College of Art and Design, the Laguna Art Museum, the Hammer Museum, and the California African American Museum in Los Angeles. His work has been reviewed in Art in America, ArtFoum.com, and the Los Angeles Times among other publications. Upcoming, Carter will have a solo exhibition at the University Galleries at Illinois State University.

on the wall
Continuing “on the wall” is a project by Rinus Van de Velde (Belgian, born 1983, lives Antwerp). Dear David Johnson, the previous exhibition at moniquemeloche, was the artist’s first exhibition in Chicago and only his third in the United States. Van de Velde studied Autonomic Arts Sculpture at Saint Lucas, Antwerp (2002-2006) and had a HISK residency at the Higher Institute for Fine Arts Flanders – Ghent (2009-2011). He has had solo exhibitions at the SMAK Museum in Ghent (2008), Art Basel Miami Beach Art Positions (2009), and the Institut fur Zeitgenossische Kunst, Nurnberg (2010). Van de Velde has solo exhibitions at at Galerie Zink, Berlin (currently) and Tim Van Laere Gallery, Antwerp (September 2011). His work has been included in international group exhibitions in cities such as Antwerp, Brussels, Dusseldorf, Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris, London, Honolulu and Tokyo and is in the public collections of Vlaams Parlement and Provincie Vlaams Brabant. Van de Velde’s “on the wall” project will remain on view until July 31, 2011.

Special thanks to The Commission of Wicker Park / Bucktown (SSA #33)
for their support of the “on the wall” series.