Prairie is a new digital projection work by Victor Burgin, created as part of Overlay, a collaborative research project undertaken this year by Burgin and D. N. Rodowick with the support of the University of Chicago’s Gray Center For Arts and Inquiry. Overlay focused on the history of “The Mecca” apartment building, built in 1892 and demolished sixty years later as part of the expansion of the Illinois Institute of Design under the plan of Mies van der Rohe, whose Crown Hall now occupies its former site. As in Burgin's recent works A Place to Read, focused on an Istanbul coffee house by Sedad Haki Eldem, and Mirror Lake, which turns around the Wisconsin “Seth Peterson Cottage” by Frank Lloyd Wright, Prairie responds to specific architectural sites (here, The Mecca and Crown Hall) and explores erased or disappeared cultural histories, real and/or imagined, inscribed in the built environment.
The exhibition opening reception is Friday, November 20, 6-9 pm.
Victor Burgin is Professor Emeritus of History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz; and Emeritus Millard Chair of Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, University of London. His books include The Remembered Film (Reaktion, 2004), In/Different Spaces: place and memory in visual culture (University of California Press, 1996), and The End of Art Theory: criticism and postmodernity (Macmillan, 1986). Monographs on his visual work include Five Pieces for Projection (Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen, 2014), and Components of a Practice (Skira, 2008).
