ANDREW RAFACZ is pleased to announce Murmelte Instrumente, new photographs and objects by Kelly Kleinschrodt in Gallery One.

Chicago, IL, May 24, 2014 – ANDREW RAFACZ continues in 2014 with Murmelte Instrumente, new works by Kelly Kleinschrodt. This is the artists first solo exhibition with the gallery. It continues through July 5, 2014.

Motherhood and the identity of the female body as mother are central to Kleinschrodt’s continually evolving multi-disciplinary practice. Murmelte Instrumente, a new body of work that is part of her ongoing, larger project mother/cut, translates to “muttering instruments” playing off its cognate relationship to the German word for mother. The muttering instruments are, for Kleinschrodt, the personified objects of motherhood, and she revels in their musicality. The breast pump, breast milk, skin, and violin are referenced throughout, as elements and subjects of the photographs as well as objects included in the installation. The title also references the nascent language between mother and newborn child, as well as the mother’s muffled voice – both literally, as she sits underneath the fabric for a portrait, and psychologically, as she assumes another identity secondary to that of her child.

In a series of new photographic works called (__’s mother), Kleinschrodt draws a direct reference to Victorian-era child portrait photography where the mother is present to hold the baby, but completely obfuscated by a dark cloth. The child appears to be sitting in front of a backdrop, which is in fact the cloaked mother. Kleinschrodt has updated this trope by producing a similar composition in iteration, photographing the seated mother in profile, and adding surrogate objects such as a breast pump and a violin to become the primary subject of the portrait. The results are simultaneously classical and conceptual, elegant, yet uncanny.

Just as the breast pump is a surrogate for the infant child, the violinist is a surrogate for the artist herself. The performance of everyday gestures and the music intrinsic to everyday objects and liquids are recurrent thematic concerns for Kleinschrodt. With previous projects, the violin and recordings of the breast pump figure directly as the instruments of live performance as a critical element of the exhibition. Eschewing the inclusion of performance, the violin and breast pump become both object and subject in the photographs and installation, creating a more suggestive relationship to the inherent musical counterpoint of object and gesture.

KELLY KLEINSCHRODT (American, b. 1983) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She received her MFA at UCLA and her BFA at the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University. Kleinschrodt has presented solo exhibitions with Carter & Citizen, Los Angeles and at UNTITLED., Miami (with Carter & Citizen); and Crisp London Los Angeles. Her work has also been exhibited and screened at Samson Projects, Boston; L.A.C.E., Los Angeles; The Wand, Berlin; Moving Image, New York; Kavi Gupta, Berlin; Museo Ex Teresa Arte Actual, Mexico City; and OPEN Contemporary Art Center, Beijing. This is her first exhibition with the gallery.