Return to the Everywhere

Opening Reception Note: Remarks at 6:15pm by Steve Edwards, Interim CEO and Chief Content Officer for WBEZ, and David Weinberg, Executive Director of Weinberg/Newton Gallery
 

Weinberg/Newton Gallery's Second Exhibition at their New River West Location is Return to the Everywhere, a new exhibition featuring work by Gwyneth Zeleny Anderson, Jesse McLean, Sayward Schoonmaker, Sonnenzimmer and Sadie Woods. 

Free and open to the public, the exhibition will run from January 24 – April 4 with an opening reception taking place on Friday, January 24 from 5-8pm at the gallery.

Presented in collaboration with WBEZ Chicago, Chicago’s NPR news station, Return to the Everywhere is the second exhibition in the gallery’s new location in River West. The exhibition considers various modalities of communication in an attempt to grasp the broader implications of our current “post-truth” era. Works on view will create space to consider the consequences of truth’s tenuity for interpersonal connection at large, and will spark discussion surrounding vital topics including fact versus fiction, truth, transparency, objectivity, bias, and belief.

“Given the current political climate, there are few topics more relevant today than the meaning of truth,” said exhibition curator and Gallery Co-Director Kasia Houlihan. “We are fortunate to be able to examine this subject through the lens of art, and hope to offer a nuanced perspective through the work of these incisive artists.”

Participating artists were able to mine WBEZ’s expansive archive for source material. Gwyneth Zeleny Anderson will present collaged audio tracks of isolated nonverbal sounds taken from these archives, and visitors will be able to scan through the tracks on a modified radio. Visitors will also be invited to interact with Sayward Schoonmaker’s multimedia work, Authoritative Forms, by holding pieces of paper containing watermarked poetry up to the light in order to read them.

“It has been gratifying to work with the Weinberg/Newton team on this exhibition as art can open up new avenues of perception, dialogue and understanding,” said Steve Edwards, Interim CEO and Chief Content Officer for WBEZ. “As an organization dedicated to reporting and programming in the public interest, we hope it can serve as a jumping off point for culturally vital discussions.”

It Was a Rebellion, an audio piece created in 2018 by deejay and sound artist Sadie Woods, will play as part of the exhibition. In this hour-long sonic exploration of the Chicago “riots” following Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination in April of 1968, Woods challenges common understandings of the event to reframe it as a legitimate rebellion, redeeming radical demonstrations in public space as expressions of hope and change.

The interactive installation Vertical Slice by Sonnenzimmer, the collective practice of artists Nick Butcher and Nadine Nakashini, will juxtapose touch, image, flatness, transmission and gravity. Two record players with their tone arms tied together in a “tug of war” will transmit a poem made up of words sourced from key moments in WBEZ’s audio archive, creating a two-channel loop transmitted via radio signal to a nearby tote bag.

Jesse McLean will exhibit Relations, a video installation featuring a never-ending reel of a spinning, illegible newspaper. A cinematic trope used both to introduce major events and show the passage of time in a film, the newspaper spins continuously towards the viewer, never arriving but guaranteeing the presence of a steady stream of information.

A programming series in alignment with Return to the Everywhere will be announced at a later date. Programming events taking place at the gallery are free and open to the public.