New work by

Jesse Harrod and Elijah Burgher

Friday March 9th 6-9pm

Please join us here at LivingRoom for this special show featuring two amazing local artists, Jesse Harrod and Elijah Burgher.

 

Our bodies accelerate quickly into extremes of pleasure and pain, often it is only the best of lovers, of landscapes, or of experiences that can tame, tease, or guide our entry into either realm. What pleasure and pain look like or feel like, though, is deeply unclear, is abstract, is insidious, is different for everyone. There is no one to one relationship when it comes to this. The serene garden hiding pistils and traps. The covert messages and innuendos of any symbolic act. The excruciating things we want to have happen.

 

Jesse Harrod has an MFA from the department of Material Studies from the School of
The Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design
University. She has been writing and making work that employs traditional and contemporary craft and sculptural practices with a focus on craft as “other” and how this pertains to queer theory as well as second and third wave feminism. Jesse is interested in working with the layers that exist within the history of cloth and fabric. Those layers include, class, colonization, trade, puberty, and domesticity.

Elijah Burgher is an artist and writer based in Chicago, IL. He has exhibited in solo shows at 2nd Floor Projects in San Francisco, CA and Shane Campbell Gallery in Oak Park, IL and two-persons shows at Lump in Raleigh, NC and Peregrine Program in Chicago. Recent group shows include exhibitions at Famous Accountants in Brooklyn, NY, Envoy Enterprises and Anna Kustera in New York, Noma in San Francisco, and Gallery 400 and Roots & Culture in Chicago.  He received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004, and a BA from Sarah Lawrence college in 2000, where he studied Literature.

 

Previous Shows:

Past Perfect -  Jamie Hayes

We here at LivingRoom could not be more delighted than to be opening the year with this one of a kind show from the multi-talented artist Jamie Hayes.

In the spring of 2009, Jamie contacted a group of friends and colleagues to participate in a collaborative project, called Past Perfect, wherein participants would work with her to design a dream garment: items they’d loved and lost or items they’d always wanted. Participants were also asked to write about why the item was important or compelling to them. The following summer, Jamie and Photographer Alix Lambert went to Vietnam and worked with tailors there to create these garments and accessories. Alix documented this process in Vietnam, as well as photographed the final portraits of the participants in their items.

This show is the first time all of these amazing items will be on display together. And we here at LivingRoom invite you to join us for what will most certainly be a remarkable evening!

 

Jamie Hayes’ interests lie at the intersection of fashion, art, culture, and identity. Her approach is both collaborative and customized. She believes that clothes should fit one’s body (not the other way around); that trends are largely irrelevant (people should wear what flatters and interests them rather than what someone else dictates is fashionable); that style is a form of self-expression; and that everyone in the chain of production of clothing should be paid a living wage.