ANDREW RAFACZ is pleased to announce 100 Years of Adventure and Discovery, an exhibition of new painting, sculpture and a light box by Peter Skvara.

Chicago, IL, June 30, 2012 – Andrew Rafacz continues the 2012 season with 100 Years of Adventure and Discovery, new work by Peter Skvara in Gallery Two. The exhibition continues through August 11, 2012.

100 years of Adventure and Discovery is titled and inspired by the National Geographic’s one hundred year anniversary volume, chronicling the first century of the National Geographic Society and it’s publication’s coverage of natural, scientific and cultural-historical events. Concurrently, the centennial collection of the publications achievements reads as an archive of human discovery and triumphs through out the last hundred years, from the surveys of global cultures in all parts of the globe to the beginnings of space exploration.

Peter Skvara’s work surveys a relationship between art, science, and instinctive human curiosity. Drawing inspiration from the mission of National Geographic, to promote culture via adventure and thus discovery, Skvara approaches his practice by learning in the process of doing. In 100 Years…, Skvara presents a series of works that serve as both art objects and documentations of curiosity driven research. In his series of Camouflage Paintings, he creates compositions using found foliage, collected from his travels through out the northwest of the United States, as stencils with camouflage colors and techniques creating paintings that reference both hunting culture and botany classification.

Using materials such as concrete and wire, Skvara presents Trap II (Hanging Snare), a sculpture and functioning snare trap that pays homage to the minimalist traditions of modernist sculpture as well as the ingenuity of basic human invention and construction. The bookend to Skvara’s exhibition is a striking sizeable light box entitled 100 Years. The work appears to depict an image of the moon’s cratered surface divided by a series of lines creating a grid, mimicking that of an archeological site. The title 100 years references the bookend chapter of the National Geographic’s centennial volume, the beginnings of space exploration. The work pays tribute to the pride of having reached the moon as a milestone in human discovery. It is upon realizing that the image in 100 years is a result of a clever series of experimentations using water and ink to create a convincing yet false representation of the moons surface, that reminds us of the inherent human nature to continue to explore and that there is plenty more to learn and discover.

—-Emanuel Aguilar

PETER SKVARA (American, b. 1985) lives and works in Chicago, IL. He received a BFA from Columbia College Chicago in 2009. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Resource at Jean Albano Gallery; Get It Together at the Chicago Cultural Center; Wow-Hause at Johalla Projects; BUNK at The Happy Collaborationists Exhibition Space; New Wave at Jean Albano Gallery. He will be part of the upcoming exhibition Sic Transit Gloria Mundi, at the Chicago Cultural Center, later this year.