ANDREW RAFACZ is pleased to announce Runner, new paintings and an installation of cast sculpture by April Street in Gallery Two.

Chicago, IL, May 24, 2014 – ANDREW RAFACZ continues the 2014 spring season with Runner, new works by April Street. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. It continues through July 5, 2014.

Comprised of the artist’s black hole paintings and an installation of 150 cast bronze birthday candles running in and out of the gallery walls, April Street’s Runner, forms paths from inner to outer space both physically and psychologically. Like Street’s previous work, there is a tension between the paintings, the objects and the viewer where things are not always what they seem. Street not only punctures holes in the walls of the gallery but also in the paintings, revealing the gestures’ ability to adapt to and manipulate our interpretation, suspending disbelief while opening up the surface of the painting to reveal its inner workings.

April Street’s black hole paintings are named after stars frequently referenced in literature; they are psychedelic time capsules holding clues to the history of painting and the personal narrative of the artist. Each painting is wrapped in black nylon with holes cut or punched through revealing layers of painted hosiery. These hosiery layers are artifacts of a private performative act in which the artist wraps herself in hosiery material to enact a series of precise body positions, recorded while sleeping, into pools of acrylic paint on a canvas. The impression made by this act creates a positive and negative, and the mark making has the appearance of a photograph. The negative on the hosiery is then reassembled onto painting’s frame. Street’s gravitational configurations of painted hosiery inside black veils of nylon evoke notions of masking, deception, sexuality, duration, and adaptation, but these objects of action also point to the act of peering through a camera’s eye piece-cropping and editing out the unnecessary.

Street’s work creates relationships in the gallery that hinge on the ability of an object to transform our interpretation with the altering of its gestures. The puncturing of the surface is made to reach inside for an understanding of how these objects can mysteriously reenact a sensation of blushing or bruising skin and create the psychological territory of the painting itself through the repurposing of its varied elements. The work ignites a conversation with eccentric abstraction, feminism, the performative and the post-war movement Art Informel, while occupying a new space.

APRIL STREET (American) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She studied traditional bronze casting in central Italy and painting at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Recent exhibitions include Carter & Citizen, Los Angeles, CA; Emerson Dorsch, Miami FL; Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Santa Monica, CA; the Santa Barbara Museum, Santa Barbara CA. She received an NEA Project Grant for her video collaboration, Imaging Appalachia. Press includes reviews and articles in Art Forum, Art in America, the San Francisco Arts Quarterly, Huffington Post, LA Weekly, Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times. This is her first exhibition with the gallery.