About the Exhibition
For the next installment of our “on the wall” series, moniquemeloche is pleased to announce the project A Silent I by Chicago-based artist Cheryl Pope this Fall/Winter 2011. As an artist-in-residence at Chicago Public School Lindblom Math and Science Academy in 2010, Pope asked the high school students to anonymously submit one truth and one lie about themselves, without designating which was which, as part of a collaborative art project. Of the 125 submitted statements, Pope selected 20 to reproduce in the style of athletic championship banners and installed them in the Lindblom gymnasium for their initial presentation. Addressing complex issues of identity, self-worth, and inter-personal relationships, this celebratory series speaks to all ages, so we invited Pope to make a more public installation “on the wall.” During the run of the exhibition, Pope will switch out the banners three times, grouping the unlabeled truths and lies in various combinations. Banners installed for Part 1 of the installation will deal with issues of internal identity while banners installed for Part 2 will reference physical identities. For Part 3 of this project, Pope will work with local teenagers from the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Creative Agency to curate the final iteration of this project.
Cheryl Pope (b. 1980, lives Chicago) received a Masters in Design in 2010 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, which was supported by a Full Tuition Merit Scholarship, and Bachelors in Fine Arts from the same in 2003. Her work has been in exhibitions at venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Morgan Conservatory in Cleveland, the Evanston Art Center, Swimming Pool Projects, and the School of the Art Instituteof Chicago, to name a few. In 2009, she was selected for Art Chicago’s exhibition New Insight, a selection of the top graduate students from the best art schools in the country, and was named one of the “Rising Stars” in the Fall issue of CS Interiors. Pope and her work have also been discussed in The New York Times and The Cleveland Scene. She has been the studio manager for artist Nick Cave since 2003 and credits him and his work as a great influence on her practice. Pope is part-time faculty at the School of Art Institute Fashion Department in Chicago. This September Pope had a solo exhibition at Dorsch Gallery in Miami, which received rave reviews in publications like Artslant, New Times Miami and more.