“Dimensional Lines: Art + Dress”
Eight Chicago-based designers expose the beauty in decay at the Evanston Art Center.
Unlike the typical gallery environment, where pristine white walls provide a blank slate as a backdrop, the “Dimensional Lines: Art + Dress” exhibition (September 11–November 6) underscores the 82-year-old Evanston Art Center’s active state of decay. Curator Gillion Carrara and contributing curator and artist Fraser Taylor invited eight Chicago-based artists to respond to the mansion’s crumbling facade “architecturally, historically and emotionally,” Taylor says. The interdisciplinary band of artists, who each have one foot in the world of fashion and the other in an additional artistic realm, created the featured works specifically for this show. As for the space, Carrara and Taylor enlisted the help of freelance theater designers Mary Griswold and Geoffrey Bushor to disorient the viewer, playing with light, creating haunting sound effects and installing additional temporary walls. Three participating artists tell us about the process and concepts behind their “Dimensional Lines” pieces.
FRASER TAYLOR
“Exploring an interest in building three-dimensional drawings, my installation occupies and demonstrates a liminal space, somewhere between being constructed and being destroyed all at once,” says Taylor, who formerly worked in fashion as a textiles designer and now focuses on drawing, painting, printing, sculpture and animation. “Working with wood, steel and wire, the materials are coated in black to manifest the decay, erosion and evolution of Evanston Art Center. Structures will project horizontally from an architectural arrangement, which will respond to and be situated in one of the ground-floor galleries…[drawing] a physical connection between the interior and exterior of the building.”
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