PRESS RELEASE ADRESSING THE BODY Opening Reception: Thursday, July 20, 2000, from 6 to 9 P.M. Exhibition Dates: July 14 through August 26, 2000 Fassbender Gallery is pleased to present ADressing the Body, a group show utilizing both the Main Gallery and Project Room. Featuring diverse works by artists ranging from across the United States and Europe, this exhibition explores body perception and adornment. For example, Dutch native Roy Villevoye addresses issues of race in large cibachrome photographs. His Proposal for Skin Transplant is a flowchart of skin tones implanted across the artist's own back. New Yorker Tamar Stone tells elaborately embroidered stories across the surfaces of old corsets. In these tales, she talks of body politics and notions of beauty. Many of these artists choose to explore issues of personal identity as defined by the clothes we wear. Chicagoan Barbara Kendrick makes clothes completely out of human hair, addressing the obsessive qualities we bring to our grooming and personal appearance. In Real Allegory, Joan Silver constructs a wedding dress out of camouflage material, thereby adding new meaning to hunting for a mate. Still other artists in the show more directly address the corporeal body, its limits and its possibilities. Los Angelino Holly Rittenhouse creates frighteningly realistic models of life-forms that seem to hybridize the botanical with the human. New Yorker Paul Shore molds funnel forms out of wax and colors them with his own blood, funneling his life-force into his art and giving us an apt metaphor for the seeming inevitability and decline in much of life. In her Moon/Flesh Studies suite of paintings, Michiko Itatani transposes the human body on the landscape and finds figures in the reflection of the Moon. Some artists in the exhibition are more lighthearted in their approach. Couturier Cat Chow pieces together simple and elegant ensembles out of cast-off and pedestrian materials. A single long zipper sewn to itself becomes and replaces a complete dress. Chicago artist Diane Simpson's Deep Pockets deconstructs a pair of pants, only to reconstruct them in unwearable building materials. Madrid resident Maribel Domenech crochets undergarments and gowns out of working electrical cables. These wearable circuits speak of our attachment to and reliance upon one another. This project is partially supported by a Grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, and the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency; as well as Absolut Citron.

Cat Chow Maribel Doménech Barbara Kendrick Michiko Itatani Holly Rittenhouse Paul Shore Joan Silver Diane Simpson Tamar Stone Roy Villevoye