Review: CarianaCarianne/I Space

RECOMMENDED

CarianaCarianne’s artistic project revolves around the task of gaining institutional acknowledgment for the two personalities existing in their singular, “collaborative” body. To this end, CarianaCarianne’s new exhibition at I Space includes notarized Last Will and Testament documents for both Cariana and Carianne, a request for a revised birth certificate to reflect the birth’s plurality, and drawings, video and sculpture that describe technologies to achieve, for example, the “merged image field” that allows Cariana and Carianne to observe and record themselves. Much has been made of the fact that CarianaCarianne are not mentally ill and do not experience themselves as having dissociative identity disorder or multiple personalities. And yet, their art has been confined by this unusual biography, trapped by a narrative of difference that informs and propels their process but also limits its range and effects. The visual elegance of the schematic drawings and the obvious challenge that CarianaCarianne pose to normative modes of perception and being are both effective in the gallery space. After a decade of this kind of work, however, one waits to see its expansion beyond legal contracts and recognition to encompass broader aesthetic questions about seeing and knowing. (Rachel Furnari)

CarianaCarianne shows at I Space, 230 W. Superior, (312)587-9976, through December 20.

A Builder of Images: A Review of Barbara Kasten at Document Space Kasten has continued to surprise and amaze over the years, and this show extends her reign as a fierce and fearless artist.
Choreographing Space: A Review of Imagined Spaces at Project Onward “Imagined Spaces” is moving because it reminds us of the interior spaces that sequestered us during the pandemic. Or how we discovered the outdoors.
Remnants and Memories: A Review of Stacy Arezou Mehrfar at Filter Space Mehrfar, a first-generation Iranian American artist, photographically questions what it is to be an immigrant, to shift shapes and landscapes, to be someone in one place, and someone different in another.
Cloud Atlas: A Review of Sonya Bogdanova at Ignition Project Space The ephemeral and intangible quality of cloud making is what binds together Bogdanova’s solo exhibition, “A Dream We Dream Together is Reality.” It’s a whimsical move, capturing, on a micro-level, the joy of seeing things in clouds, which is to say, the perceiving of meaning in the random.
Space Age: A Review of "Michiko Itatani: Celestial Stage" at Wrightwood 659 Itatani paints a mysterious but familiar world, its meaning just beyond our reach. Grand in vision and in scale, immense canvases depict palatial baroque libraries set against the cosmos.
Light and Space: The Magic of Sonja Thomsen's Experiential Art I've come to understand that my practice is really about responding to a body in space and the way we move through that space, the way light activates that space.

Related Stories