Gisela Insuaste
aerial nomads
opening April 29 6-9 PM
continues Through May 28
Hours 12-6 Tuesday-Saturday
Bucket Rider Gallery
119 N. Peoria #3D
Chicago IL 60607
312-421-6993
info@bucketridergallery.com
Gisela Insuaste was born in New York City in 1975 and received her BA in studio art and anthropology from Dartmouth in 1997. She completed her MFA in painting and drawing at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2003. Aerial Nomads is Insuaste's second solo show with Bucket Rider Gallery. Her first exhibition, Clandestino, took place in October 2003. Her installation work can currently be seen in a group show, Research, at the NIU gallery, and she has forthcoming shows Cultural Center of Chicago and the Three Arts Club. She is the recent recipient of the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Individual Artist Award, in the newly added 'Emerging Artist' category.
Insuaste's work is based on episodic memories that are triggered by real and imagined ethnographic experiences in rural and urban landscapes. These landscapes are precarious: shifty, unstable, unpredictable, unsettled and ambiguous. They reflect the physically, emotionally, and socio-politically charged spaces we currently live in, where political unrest, social unease, and economic instability affect our individual and collective concepts of space, time, history, and memory.
Aerial Nomads is inspired by Paul Virilio's idea of history as a "landscape of events," a landscape having no fixed meaning, no privileged vantage but is oriented by the itinerary passerby. This perspective is also informed by the interconnectedness of people, places, and things in the artist's life and her personal landscape. The new objects in this exhibition resemble vertical structures, 4 and 3 legged tower-like things that allude to forms that are inherently objects of 'power' ready to be activated. Her new paintings and drawings are based on travel sketches from of objects on stilts, such as houses, boats, and kiosks. These structures, built to keep people and things off the ground and into safer space, also reference the fragility of a landscape and its inherent power dynamics. Ultimately, Insuaste is creating a new eschatology, providing a space for new hopefulness and possibility. She is examining, the "threads that connect each of us to each other, to a place that shifts and transforms itself over and over again."