September 29-October 5, 2011

The Art of Participation

From Cubism to Andy Warhol's Campbell's soup cans, Pop Art still holds court as one of the most relevant art movements of the twenty-first century due to its on-going dialogue with contemporary popular culture. In their exhibition, Please Stand By, artists Stacia Yeapanis and anonymous internet video artist Readymade 777 take this discussion a step further by using appropriation and transformation to reveal how viewers and users of cultural products like TV shows, movies, and video games, not only make meaning from the images they digest, but often become active participants in cultural production themselves.

Yeapanis' hand-made cross-stitches are painstaking recreations of a single frame from TV shows such as Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Xena: Warrior Princess, using the decorative handicraft of embroidery as a symbol of how far we have invited and incorporated these fictional TV characters into our personal lives. Similarly, artist Readymade777 cuts together everything from VHS home video footage, film clips, 50's TV commercial, to pornography turning them into disorienting and often harrowing digital assemblages that jolt the viewer into making visual and psychological connections between images and genres.

About Stacia Yeapanis
Stacia Yeapanis is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist and a media fan. Yeapanis received
her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a member of the Chicago-based artist collective Henbane. Yeapanis' first monograph was published as part of The Museum of Contemporary Photography's Midwest Photographers Publication Project in 2009. Her recent exhibitions include Losing Yourself in the 21st Century (Atlanta and Baltimore), MP3: Midwest Photographers Project (Chicago) and RE: Figure (Chicago). Yeapanis is currently a 2011-2012 BOLT resident (Chicago, IL) and has an upcoming solo show in the BOLT Project Space (May 2012).

About Readymade777
Somewhere deep within the catacombs of Readymade777's agile brain, you'll find an artist
frantically searching for the remote control. Taking his/her moniker from Marcel Duchamp, for
the past 10 years anonymous video artist Readymade777 has managed to seize viewers' attention
and hold it captive, garnering over 100,000 unique views from the platform of his/her YouTube
channel. Readymade777's short clips from American cinema, television advertisements, and
pornography create subversive video mixes that are simultaneously erotic, grotesque and hilarious.