Cito, Longe, Tarde
Haynes, Chicago
Oct 3 – Nov 22 2020

Yuji Agematsu, Ally Almore, Daniel Baird, John Divola, Matt Hanner, Jenine Marsh, Alva Mooses, Julia Phillips


Work:
Symbiont, 2020. hydrocal, train-pressed coins, wire, epoxy clay, wood filler, acrylic. 6.5 x 5 x 6.5"


Exhibition text by Jessica Cochran:

Haynes announces its inaugural exhibition, Cito, Longe, Tarde, at a newly renovated space in Chicago’s Bridgeport neighborhood. Housed in the garage of a former bakery, the project space is domestically scaled, offering intimate opportunities to engage with artists working internationally and in Chicago. Founder, Jessica Cochran, has been a curator and arts administrator working in Chicago for over a decade. This first group exhibition features new works by Jenine Marsh (Toronto) and Alva Mooses (New York), as well as recent and existing works by Ally Almore (Chicago), Daniel Baird (Chicago), John Divola (Los Angeles), Matt Hanner (Chicago, d. 2011), and Julia Phillips (Chicago/Berlin).

Cito, Longe, Tarde means to leave quickly, fly far, and return slowly. This phrase was used during the Middle Ages as a warning for great epidemics of infectious diseases, advising the only possible remedy: flight. In light of the recent pandemic, and in the context of social movements, what does it actually mean for the body to leave quickly, and where does one go? What if to fly far means to shelter-in-place alone, or to perform essential labor with others, all the while finding respite in the outer reaches of our imaginaries? What if, to come back slowly is to cautiously renegotiate the world as someone who is always, for the most part, waiting?

With its title as a lens, this exhibition is conceived as a dramaturgy of objects and images that create a space for quiet reflection on lexicons of individual movement—physical and psychic—relative to the passage of time or collective body. Works in this exhibition do not all comment on the pandemic itself or on the social landscape of 2020, but they all ruminate on adjacent, mutable ideas: ways to escape; proximity re-imagined; spaces of safety; thresholds of human connection. At turns, there are poetic or affective gestures that serve a kind of hospitality to the viewer to occupy another’s world, if but for a short time.

In the early stages of quarantine, Zadie Smith wrote in her book Imitations, “the crisis has taken this familiar division between the time of art and the time of work and transformed it. Now there are essential workers—who do not need to seek out something to do; whose task is vital and unrelenting—and there are the rest of us … suddenly confronted with the perennial problem of artists: time, and what to do in it.” Some of the spaces, bodies, and objects we encounter in this exhibition are decidedly that of the artist—bodies in their habitation, spaces of one’s imaginary, objects born in studio.

In Cito, Longe, Tarde, we feel the problem of adaptation as a proposition of art. Materials, forms, and subjects—aesthetic decision after decision—create for us new contours around the work of everyday life.