FOLDS 

January 17 - March 15, 2025

Opening reception: Friday, January 17, 5-8PM

Details here

ARTISTS: Alexandra Barth, Rachael Bos, Robert Burnier, Nick Cave, Tim Doud, Crystal Gregory, Dan Gunn, Harmony Hammond, Cameron Harvey, Mie Kongo, Jo Sandman, Alyson Shotz, Malicke Sidibé, Samantha Thomas and Letha Wilson.

The fold forms, informs, and deforms. … With the fold the material transforms itself to contain its subject, allowing access to its content. The fold articulates the art as an object while punctuating its dynamic subject-content. Most importantly, the fold moves us emotionally by the implied and real physicality of its active displacements.*

(Chicago) SECRIST | BEACH is pleased to announce our first survey exhibition of 2025, FOLDS. FOLDS brings together a group of artists that formally and conceptually incorporate “folds” into their artworks, highlighting the deceptively simple yet germane moment an inanimate object or thing is - or becomes - expressive. The exhibition includes an intergenerational roster of artists and was curated with the assistance of gallery artist Diana Guerrero-Maciá. FOLDS is presented in conjunction with Guerrero-Maciá's solo exhibition PAINTINGS FOR BIRDS at 1801 W. Hubbard St. from January 17 through March 15, 2025.

The concept for FOLDS evolved from Guerrero-Maciá’s early art class experience with the ubiquitous exercise of drawing still lifes that include drapes and folds of fabric in the composition. The difficulty of rendering these elements eventually led to her decision to eliminate drawing altogether and instead use the fabric itself as a medium for drawing and painting. Building on this, FOLDS takes on this deceivingly natural everyday physical moment and inserts a wide range of dual metaphorical implications: hiding/revealing, deformation/reformation, compression/release, flexible/rigid, etcetera. The variety of approaches on view - from sartorial to semiotic - articulate complexities in ways that implore attention while amplifying the mundane into a gesture that evolves into something dynamic. 

When they appear in or as works of art, the form of the fold both produces and expects degrees of fidelity, resolution, and sentience. Compositionally, folds delineate and generate movement and energy, with a keen sense of suggested accuracy. This sense of volume then renders qualities of resolution, sharpening the image or object as it relates to the body, gravity and weight. The physicality of and by the fold seems to arrest a moment of intimacy somewhere between the depiction of the thing and how the thing is depicted, as if the folds are emotional repositories of narratives of becoming and creating. Where the fold expects a degree of fidelity, resolution, and sentience is the foundational necessity of specific qualities of a fold to represent and define. For the artists in FOLDS, where the form is investigated, interrogated, and appreciated, the symbolic and effective potential for the fold becomes expansive.

*Perrone, Jeff. ”Working Through, Fold by Fold”, Artforum, January 1979, pages 44-50. 

Image: Cameron Harvey, Figure 1: Cor (Rhus Integrifolia), 2021, Acrylic on canvas, 120in x 54 in