Dana DeGiulio, Marie T Hermann, Anders Ruhwald

On Sunday, October 24th, devening projects + editions presents Kabinett 3, the third in a year-long series of exhibitions featuring collaborative projects by international artists. Kabinett 3 features work by Chicago artist Dana DeGiulio and Danish ceramic artists Marie Torbensdatter Hermann and Anders Ruhwald. Please join us for the opening reception from 4 – 7 on Sunday.

For much of his career, the Danish artist Anders Ruhwald has been producing eccentric sculptural objects — almost exclusively from glazed earthenware — and using them in installations that consider how objects enrich and foil our existence. Mostly domestic feeling, Ruhwald’s sculptures have a lumpy friendliness that belies the complexity found in their humble but dignified form. These are cartoonish provocations, not easily categorized and constantly thwarting a direct read. They also feel character-based, or maybe they’re really just props for weird characters. In Kabinett 3, we recognize two of the works as a lamp and a chair. Both of are slightly turgid exaggerations of domestic necessities made more bewildering by some essential distortion. Regardless, there is a wary sense of comfort in having them around; continually nudging us in and out of any sense of complacency.

For Kabinett 3, Dana DeGiulio is using the gallery as a expanded drawing field. Her installation is both a stage set for the entire exhibition and a composition-in-the-round. Using found and manufactured material, she choreographs her moves to pace and direct the way we negotiate the space. While passing through, we see weird stuff moving up and off wall; often rudely interrupting the sanctity of the white space and the other works in the exhibition. This is pure expression slowed down by an awareness that the components have been carefully cast in her studio, brought to the gallery as raw material and then composed on site. The acrylic paint peels stretch and hang between corners of the room; strings connect objects; plastic lays over and nearby other works. There are also paintings in the exhibition, but they’re presented not as discreet objects but as components annexed for the greater good. As her practice reveals, the work for Kabinett 3 shows a desire to make gesture variable, portable, isolated, something other than raw expression. In her hands, the mark is an aftereffect, a consequence of matter and interference.

As a highly skilled potter, the Danish artist Marie Torbensdatter Hermann brings a nuanced touch to the small cups and pots that often come off the wheel in her studio. These lovingly crafted manifestations express a desire to make sensual the prosaic utensil and take it beyond usefulness to a point of pensive reflection. Memory is clearly at work in her process. The pieces are steeped in personal history and attempt to capture certain feelings that come from the knowledge of familiar things. That delicacy has recently given over to a newer, more assertive approach to object building that relies less on the wheel-thrown vessel but moves toward the roughness of hand built sculptures. These recent pieces often feel landscape-based and suggest forms cast from nature rather than from the hand. She is also placing these new works in relation to contradictory elements that distort scale and begin to feel like small collections of eccentric discoveries.