With gallery displays of local artists’ work painfully absent during the COVID-19 crisis, Gathered Glassblowing Studio decided to embrace the challenge of bringing the art scene back to life downtown by displaying the work of local artists in their storefront windows. In association with Chicago’s Purple Window Gallery, the exhibit features work by Jordan Buschur, James DirtyKics Dickerson, Cyd Gottlieb and Katrina Niswander, all of whom capture the peculiarities of human connection during the quarantine.
“The Hello Neighbor exhibition came up as this way for artists to share work in domestic spaces and in our storefronts during the pandemic, allowing people to still engage with the artwork,” explains Ian Welch, gallery manager at Gathered. He’d been invited by the director and co-founder of Purple Window Gallery to have his own work on display there in Chicago, but Welch thought his copperplate engravings and etchings were more suited to close-up, intimate viewing. However, it did plant the seed for what Gathered could do during quarantine to display artwork in the same way.
“I spent some time thinking about what the term ‘Hello Neighbor’ means given the context for the show,” says Welch. “And I really like this idea of talking about human connections, and how maybe our connections with people have changed.”
The four artists tackle this theme in very different ways, from Dickerson’s documentary-style photography that captures the lives of the socially distant to Gottlieb’s more abstract take on the conversation. “Her imagery is born out of how she occupies space and how her kineticism as a person influences the space around us,” Welch points out.
The varied approaches all the artists take to the subject of shared human experiences make the exhibit that much more compelling. Niswander’s work is all about using old photographs to craft a story that maybe wasn’t explicitly there before, playing with the notion of memory and perspective, and “creating new connections that potentially breath new life into them,” says Welch. While, “in Jordan’s work, she has stacks of domestic books and piles of ephemera,” a way of indicating the presence of human interaction by showing what we leave in our wake.
Viewing this exhibit through the window of Gathered is undoubtedly the most timely way you could experience art, as our world shifts seamlessly in and out of fear— fear of the virus, fear of each other, fear of what is to come. It’s a reminder that we are all connected at a time when we most need reminding.
“It’s interesting now because all of this is taking on such a different tone, given what’s happened in the last week or so,” adds Welch, referring to the nationwide protests in response to George Floyd’s murder. “And I was thinking about how these connections change, and how people kind of have to figure out different ways to be human with each other.”
Hello Neighbor is expected to be on display from Wednesday, June 10 until Saturday, June 27, though dates are subject to change due to protests downtown (Gathered has released a statement in support of the protests). Visits inside the studio are by appointment only until further notice. Gathered Glassblowing Studio. 23 N. Huron St. 419-262-5501. Gatheredglass.com. Purplewindowgallery.com
