55 E. Randolph Street
Pedway Level Chicago
Chicago, Illinois
United States
Space p11 is a new, independent gallery for off-grid art, architecture, and culture.
Directed by David L. Hays and Jonathan Solomon, Space p11 explores divergent futures and evolving alternatives to modern progress, bringing people and ideas together through exhibitions, performances, talks, and reading groups that foreground outside research, extra-disciplinarity, shared agency, and distributed expertise.
Space p11 is located within the Pedway, a network of pedestrian tunnels and bridges, commercial spaces, government facilities, transit stations, and other public and private infrastructure threaded throughout the Loop, in the heart of downtown Chicago. Out of sight but within easy reach, the Pedway is used daily by thousands of commuters, residents, and students to whom it offers shortcuts through the urban grid and shelter from extreme weather, yet it remains little known to others.
Space p11 is a project of Acute Angles, Inc., a Chicago-based non-profit committed to editorial, curatorial, and event-based projects in arts and culture. Designed by Chicago architects Future Firm, the gallery appropriates methods of retail display—from picture windows to neon signage—to reach an audience of commuters, residents, students, and explorers.
Exhibitions may be experienced during specially scheduled openings or viewed from the Pedway during its regular hours (Monday-Friday, 4am-7pm; Saturday 8am-7:30pm; closed Sunday). Other events—including performances, talks, and reading groups—will supplement the exhibition program.
Phytovision
Phytovision, an exhibition of work by Lindsey french, is the inaugural exhibition at Space p11 and will be on view from December 4, 2018, to January 12, 2019.
Phytovision facilitates phytocentric experiences, reworking digital video for plant perception. On a standard screen, a digital image is constructed from three primary colors—red, green, and blue—designed specifically for human eyes with those three cones, whereas most plants perceive light only in red and blue spectra. Plants also perceive gravity, electric fields, water content of soil and air, touch, sound, and a host of chemical interactions, airborne or passing through soil. In Phytovision, video portraits of old growth white pine, hemlock, ferns, and forest flowers are filtered for the light spectrum of plant perception and slowed to plant time, while airborne molecules are released into the air as olfactory communication.
“Phytovision, as both a practice of perception and a plant-oriented media, begins as an experiment to destabilize the primacy of human vision,” states french, “and it quietly opens a number of modes of perception beyond the clear distinctions of our human senses.”
Phytovision is a featured part of Short Cuts, a program of Pedway-based events organized by Acute Angles, Inc., with support from the Chicago Loop Alliance.
