elsetime
A Solo Exhibition by Ellen Rothenberg
CHICAGO — The Green Lantern Press is pleased to present elsetime, a solo exhibition by Ellen Rothenberg at Sector 2337. Featuring new work in a wide range of media from photography, performance, and installation, elsetime examines the difficulty of artistic lineage exploring history’s dislocated presence. Central to Rothenberg’s artistic retcon is the image of her walking in the study of Bertolt Brecht. How can plans for a future protest affect the furniture of the past? Rothenberg expands from there, refracting through additionally (and personally) significant figures like Stefan Brecht and Simone Forti, along with temporally specific locales like post-war Berlin, Woodstock, and downtown New York; layering these sites and personae, Rothenberg traces a range of influences through objects and sometimes ambiguous politics. elsetime is the material culmination of the artist negotiating, inserting, and revising past and future selves in the present now. A series of public programs entitled “Not to be Taken,” is an additional elements of elsetime. Not to be Taken Performance Series invites select artists and thinkers to publicly use elsetime as a generative studio space in which she can engage questions about legacy and politics, place and time, through discrete actions; these subjective, ephemeral responses momentarily transform the exhibition with the performer’s unique potential.
May 9 – July 3, 2015
Curated by Caroline Picard
Ellen Rothenberg, elsetime, 2015. Installation view, Sector 2337, Chicago. Photo by Clare Britt.
“One of things that’s really striking about this show was all of the overlapping temporalities. As someone who works on photography, I’ve been really interested in the presentness of the past and I think that different pasts are very present in this exhibition in a way that I find really exciting and engaging.” Hannah B Higgins, Shawn Smith, and Ellen Rothenberg appeared in conversation on May 30, 2015.
Documentation of Not to be Taken performance series
Not to be Taken invites select artists and thinkers to publicly use elsetime as a generative studio space in which she can engage questions about legacy and politics, place and time, through discrete actions; these subjective, ephemeral responses momentarily transform the exhibition with the performer’s unique potential.
Terri Kapsalis, Anne Elizabeth Moore, and Tim Schwartz, Not to be Taken, June 20, 2015. This three-part performance action involved a reading of pulp detective novel excerpts, an improvised conversation, and a sung recitation. Photo by Ellen Rothenberg.
Mark Booth & Becky Grajeda, Not to be Taken, June 13, 2015. Photo by Jesse Eisenberg. Grajeda and Booth organized a series of actions that involved recording the movement of chairs around the gallery, musical compositions, and spoken recitation.
Dao Nguyen, Not to be Taken, May 30, 2015. Nguyen created a five-act performance that involved a Janis Joplin track and on-going reconfiguration of chairs.
Alexandria Eregbu, Not to be Taken, May 23, 2015. For this Saturday action, Eregbu asked participants to reenact Simone Forti’s “Huddle.” Photo by Deanna Ledezma.
Tim Kinsella, Not to be Taken, May 16, 2015. Kinsella builds a dashiki fort before reading a biographical account of his preceding 24 hours. Photo by Caroline Picard.
Artist CV / Bio
Ellen Rothenberg’s work is concerned with the politics of everyday life and the formation of communities through collaborative practices. Her installations and public projects often employ the iconography of social movements and their residual documents to interrogate the mechanisms underlying contemporary political engagement and social dialogue. Her work—architecturally scaled installations, public projects, performance, collaborations, and writing —uncovers histories embedded in the present, particularly those of women, labor, and feminism. Her approach to form and material is informed by these concerns, and inflect meaning beyond their historical conventions. Her work has been presented in North America and Europe at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Museum of Fine Arts and The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; The Museum of London, Ontario; The Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco; The Neues Museum Weserburg, Bremen; Royal Festival Hall, London; The Brukenthal National Museum, Sibiu, Romania; among others. Awards include NEA Regional Fellowships, The Bunting Institute Fellowship Radcliffe College Harvard University, Illinois Arts Council Fellowships, The Massachusetts Artist Foundation Fellowships, and grants from CEC Artslink, The Charles Engelhard Foundation, The LEF Foundation, and NEA Artists Projects. Rothenberg teaches at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and at the Vermont College Fine Arts Graduate Program
REVIEWS
“Anyone prepared to spend time with the work will be rewarded, not with answers, but with a deepened appreciation of how unnecessary such summaries are.”
—Artslant: May 27, 2015, “The Personal Is Political: Ellen Rothenberg at Sector 2337″ by James Pepper Kelley
“Elsetime” is an operation in ways to proceed forward, a challenging exhibition that provides rewards if you want them.”
—Newcity Art: June 13, 2015, RECOMMENDED: Ellen Rothenberg at Sector 2337 by Chris Reeves