Opening reception: October 27, 6-9 PM

Artist Talk with Kelly Kaczynski and Stan Shellabarger: Wednesday, November 7, 5:30pm

Julius Caesar presents a new series of works by Kelly Kaczynski completed over the last two years. This project began with the invitation of fellow artist Stan Shellabarger to work on a printmaking project of her own design. In approaching the work, Kaczynski decided to continue the use of the stage, a form they have been addressing in sculpture and installation for a decade now.

In recent years, Kaczynski has been concerned with approaching affect and empathy in forming the stage. The prints began as a simple exercise to see how a provisional stage could be built on paper as it would be built in real space—one scaffold at a time. The project quickly became an opportunity to see how the original structure could shift in sequence, placement, and color with each pass through the press to realize a distinct frame of reference, or attitude.

This series of prints, each one of a kind, uses iteration to explore both formal properties and possibilities of expression or states of being. The investigation of spatial optics and color is important in these prints, but so too is the translation of everyday goings on. One day a week for the duration of the process, Kaczynski and Shellabarger met to work on the prints and would talk about the interim days, their families, their bodies, the world, their work and more. The iterations are not only a studied engagement with visual language, they also reveal the layers of a life lived in the time of their making.

Kelly Kaczynski is a Chicago based artist working within the language of sculpture. Selected exhibitions include The Suburban, WI; Peregrineprogram, IL; Songs for Presidents, NY; Ortega y Gasset Projects, NY; Soap Factory, MN; Comfort Station, IL; Gahlberg Gallery, IL; threewalls, IL; Hyde Park Art Center, IL; University at Buffalo Art Gallery, NY; Triple Candie, NY; Islip Art Museum, NY; Josee Bienvenu Gallery, NY; DeCordova Museum, MA; Boston Center for the Arts, MA. Public installations include projects with the Main Line Art Center, Haverford, PA; the Interfaith Center, NY; Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston and the Boston National Historic Parks, MA; Boston Public Library, MA. Curatorial projects include the 2014 exhibitions, Roving Room at Habersham Mills, GA and Virtually Physically Speaking at Columbia College, Chicago, IL and the 2011 exhibition Mouthing (a sentient limb) at the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, IL. Recipient of Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award ’15; Artadia, Chicago ’08; Visible Republic, Boston, ’00. Kaczynski received an MFA from Bard College, NY and BA from The Evergreen State College, WA. She is Adjunct Associate Professor with the School of the Art Institute, Chicago.