Works

Dave Jordano - Chanute Air force Base #9, Chicago IL - 2007
30 x 40 inches

Exhibition Details

Recent portraits by Laura Chasman and Dave Jordano’s photographs of storefront churches in Chicago and the abandoned Chanute Air Force Base will be featured at Clark Gallery from February 3 through 27, 2010. All are welcome to join the artists for an opening reception and book signing on Saturday, February 6th from 4-6pm.  Dave Jordano will be signing copies of his monograph, Articles of Faith, which includes images featured in the exhibition.

Laura Chasman: Portraits, for the first time, includes an installation of Laura’s ongoing 20 year endeavor of depicting her son, Oliver, at transformative times throughout his life. Laura’s strong conceptual time-based premise of portraying Oliver periodically the past twenty years has evolved throughout her career, becoming part ritual, part performance, part collaboration and part obsession. Like  Rineke Dijkstra’s ongoing series of Almerisa,  or Nick Nixon’s 25 Years of the Brown Sisters, Laura’s serial portraits of Oliver, set against solid backgrounds of color, are transcendent, inspirational and visionary.

In additional to the installation of Oliver throughout the years, Laura has created a series of deeply personal and poignant portraits of caretakers and healers, in the nursing homes and hospitals, that she frequents in her capacity as a social worker. Her portraits mark the distinctive characteristics of each person with an insightful and reflective gaze, representing what she terms as “a visual journal of my life.”  Rendered in gouache on museum board, Chasman’s portraits possess an immediacy and handled familiarity that move beyond the characteristics of formal portraiture.

Laura Chasman is currently featured in the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition Exhibition at the prestigious National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.  A recent finalist in the Artadia Awards Boston, she was awarded the eighth annual Maud Morgan Prize and has been the recipient of two Artists’ Resource Trust Grants.  In addition, Chasman has exhibited regionally at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Danforth Museum of Art, New Art Center, and in various university galleries.  Her work is widely represented in public and private collections, including the MFA, Boston.

For the past decade, photographer Dave Jordano has explored the culture of African-American storefront churches dotting the south and west side neighborhoods of Chicago.  Often centers of the community, these sacred spaces offer comfort, hope, and connectedness for churchgoers who have to bear the burden of living in a harsh inner-city environment riddled with crime, drugs, gangs, prostitution, and broken families.  In contrast to these photographs, Jordano has been making images of the abandoned Chanute Air Force Base in Rantoul, Illinois, the largest single military building in the United States before the construction of the Pentagon.  The base closure seventeen years ago was a catalyst for the economic decline suffered by Rantoul and the surrounding region. Jordano’s images of its steady decay and deterioration serve as a compelling illustration of the United States’ involvement with international peace-keeping efforts and the ways in which our standing as an esteemed world power has been thus affected.  

Faith and Fury is Dave Jordano’s first solo exhibition in New England. Jordano is the author of Articles of Faith, African-American Community Churches of Chicago, published by The Center for American Places in 2009.  His photographs have been widely exhibited at venues including the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, and the Houston Center for Photography.  Jordano is represented nationally in public and private collections, including the MFA, Boston.