After nearly four years, The Outhaus is coming to a close; their final show is coming up at the end of this month, featuring Peregrination: A Kinship memoir by Samantha Hill, improvisations by Matthew Steinke and work by Carlie Trosclair. The opening reception for it will take place on Friday, March 30 from 5 to 8 p.m. The Outhaus is located at 709 E Sunnycrest Drive in Urbana, in the backyard, and this is your last chance to check it out!
Here are some descriptions of the work, as well as artists’ bios:
THIS IS THE FINAL SHOW AT THE OUTHAUS.
________________________SAMANTHA HILL
Peregrination: A Kinship memoir
On the journey of life, we leave a footprint in the earth. Each footprint is a memory, which touches another memory to form a tale of place. We document this narrative through photography and handwritten letters to make a connection to those we love as well as to ourselves. Peregrination is an invitation for you to explore this communal memoir that transcends consciousness, location and time.
_________________________________MATTHEW STEINKE
Improvisations
Throughout the opening, Matthew will be performing sporadically in the basement of the Outhaus Inn (the large house in front of the Outhaus), showing video projections while performing with The Stepper Rattle and other kinetic electroacoustic instruments.
_________________________________________CARLIE TROSCLAIR
Appearing in the front yard of the Outhaus Inn (the Antehaus), courtesy of local arts collective Say Uncle, will be the work of artist Carlie Trosclair. Say Uncle is pleased to tour the work of Carlie Trosclair, who focuses on structural and decorative layers that compose the narrative of a building’s material history. During residency with Say Uncle in Fall 2017, Trosclair continued these themes by casting various architectural elements of local residential interiors and reclaimed objects. The hollow latex forms range from recognizable stair railings to recombinations of salvaged ornate columns. Between Barriers and Banisters visualizes a preservation of previously disassociated objects, each individually embedded with the ephemeral imprint of past dwellings.
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__________________________________Samantha Hill artist Bio:
Samantha Hill is a transdisciplinary artist based in Chicago with an emphasis on archives, social projects & art facilitations. Hill develops interactive photography installations and performances within historic landmarks and public locations. The purpose of these interventions is to create an ephemeral memorial which reflects significant components of a region’s culture & history through community engagement.
Hill participated in exhibitions and residences at several institutions including the Anchorage Museum, AK; Blue Mountain Center, Mary and Leigh Block Museum, Museum of Contemporary Photography and Glass Curtain Galley at Columbia College, Hyde Park Art Center and McColl Center for Art & Innovation, Charlotte, NC. Her honors including International Sculpture Center Award, Chicago Artist Coalition MAKER Grant and a nomination in 2017 for the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant. Hill’s work is also featured in the book Problematizing Public Pedagogy, published by Routledge Press.
Hill’s current endeavor, the Kinship Project, is an archive of over 150 years of African-American family photographs, objects and ephemera ranging from 1839 to 2012. She utilizes this archive as source material for installation projects to connect individual experiences to historic developments within regional culture.
_________________________________________Matthew Steinke artist bio:
Matthew is an alchemist. In this era of social-media détournement, quirky apps, post-Internet readymades, and multimedia works created by collectives and artstars with workshops of hirelings, he has the skills, the ideas, and the incomparable work ethic to operate as a lone no-budget demiurge. His dense, funny, and haunting videos, installations, and performances feature everything from animatronic puppets and meticulous animation to interactive homemade kinetic and sound apparatuses, each offering an incomplete glimpse into an evocative, elegant, claustrophobic cosmos. Matthew’s ingenious robotic instruments continue to expand his uncanny electro-acoustic palette, through which he continues to pursue not only structural and textural experiments in sound, but ornate compositions that borrow equally from pop, jazz, and classical traditions.
The austere chill of most fine art referencing technology is a modernist carryover that fails to recognize the strange ways in which machines can become more familiar than people, and natural surfaces, like our bodies, can in turn become alien terrain. Matthew is not only an incredible craftsman, but he creates complex, evocative contraptions and situations that deploy mediated memories of childhood not just for one-note depictions of nostalgic abjection, but dig into the primordial ambiguity at the threshold of living and nonliving objects.
_________________________________________Carlie Trosclair artist bio:
Carlie Trosclair (b. New Orleans, LA) is an installation artist based in St. Louis, Missouri. Trosclair earned an MFA from the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, a BFA from Loyola University New Orleans, and is a Fellow of the Community Arts Training Institute. Trosclair completed residencies at MASS MoCA; Assets for Artists (MA), Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (NE), Oxbow (MI), Playa (OR), ACRE (WI), Vermont Studio Center (VT), Woodside Contemporary Artists Center (NY), chashama (NY) and The Luminary Center for the Arts (MO). Trosclair is the recipient of the Riverfront Time’s Mastermind Award, Creative Stimulus Award, Regional Arts Commission Artist Fellowship, and the Great Rivers Biennial. Trosclair is co-director of Museum Blue, an artist run gallery founded in 2014.
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_________________________________________THE OUTHAUS IS LOCATED AT 709 E. SUNNYCREST DRIVE IN URBANA, IN THE BACKYARD.
Opening reception Friday, March 30, 5-8 pm.
This will be our last opening, after three and a half years of amazing shows by mostly (at least temporarily) Midwest-based artists.
Photo provided by the Outhaus.