Past Exhibitions > Judith Brotman Love Letters to My Strange Familiars September 10 - October 6th, 2024

For over thirty years, Judith Brotman’s approach to art making has enlisted a panoply of materials, mediums, and intertextualities into a mélange of inquiry that ceaselessly, compulsively processes the state of things into an eccentric archive of sculpture, collage, text-based sound and video, and a watchful recovery effort for the offhanded artifact that may serve metonymically for the most arch philosophical problems to haunt art history, literature, and the humanities more broadly. Brotman’s penchants for accreted embellishment, cathetic overinvestments, and fantastical curiosities have served to confront the accelerationist stage of manufacturing that defines our cultural and consumer landscapes, all the while searching restlessly, lustily, for the mechanics of how a self is positioned to comprehend herself within such a melee of physical vestiges and trenchant psychological signifiers. Unresolved narratives, unreliable narration, and a morphing cast of familiars stoke Brotman’s impulses that seem always to overshoot from the material strategy at hand into perambulations of variables that skip and stutter from kiss to tissue to hands, handiwork, manicures, a book that is held open, a word, the magic words, incantations, disidentifications, mischief, trouble, outright dissent.

Since 2010, Judith Brotman and Matt Morris’ friendship has repeatedly worked through the space of the exhibition as a means of honoring artistic labor and working collaboratively to develop possibilities for pluralistic meaning. Among other joint efforts, Morris has curated Brotman’s work (The Mechanics of Joy, December 2010, U-turn Art Space, Cincinnati, OH), and written exhibition texts for Brotman’s solo presentations at Chicago’s Bike Room, 2012, and at Tetrapod Gallery in Los Angeles, 2022. This project at Material Exhibitions provides the two artists and thinkers the latest opportunity to work together.

Love Letters to My Strange Familiars samples from a very prolific period of working to which Brotman has been committed in the past couple of years. Her efforts have yielded some significant transformations in her making, while also acting forensically to re-enter previous formats and mediums through which she’s cycled over longer arches of time in her studio. Assemblage, embroidery, and ornamented found objects are methods Brotman has brought with her into a diligent study of arcane magic practices, a courageous commitment to resistance and healing as modes for engaging with an unpredictable social, and a complex integration of what might provisionally be called portrait photography.

The installation at Material will allow for critical distancing, slowing while looking, and holding softly—isolating this or that gesture that is already excessive in its own right and often compounded with even further material densities in many of Brotman’s immersive installations. A selection of works proceed around the room as a formal (if not also poetic and abstract) demonstration of the journey from a self’s interior toward an engagement (critical, compassionate) with the other beyond her, an analysis of mores by which such contact is structured, and finally a gentle rending of body from image, self from gaze in a loop of brand new short video works that compliment Brotman’s self portraiture elsewhere on view. 





Artist Bio

Judith Brotman is a multidisciplinary artist and educator from Chicago. Her work includes mixed media installations, theatrical immersive environments, and language/text-based projects. Brotman’s work frequently occupies a space between abstraction and figuration, deterioration and regeneration, elegance and awkwardness, generosity and obligation.  In a world of uncertain outcomes, Brotman emphasizes the possibility of healing and transformation. Additionally, she explores the potential of social media as a site of real interaction or conversation. In all her works, Brotman considers spaces of not knowing to be both complex and generative despite, or perhaps due to, the resulting cliffhanger of uncertainty. 

Exhibitions venues include: Smart Museum of Art, SOFA Chicago, Columbia College/Chicago, Indiana University Northwest, Franconia Sculpture Park, Hampshire College, The Society of Arts & Crafts/Boston, Boundary, Mobilia Gallery, The Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Asphodel Gallery, INOVA, the DeVos Art Museum, Weinberg/Newton Gallery, Threewalls, Circa Modern, Slow Gallery, Chicago Cultural Center, Tiger Strikes Asteroid/Chicago, Chicago Artists Coalition, Hyde Park Art Center, Gallery 400, and The Illinois State Museum. Brotman’s work is in the collection of The Museum of Fine Arts Boston, The Illinois State Museum, and the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection as well as in many private collections. Brotman received her BFA and MFA from the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she has taught for over twenty years. www.judithbrotman.com
 
 
 
Curator Bio



Matt Morris is an artist, perfumer, and writer based in Chicago. Morris has presented artwork internationally including Andrew Kreps, Margot Samel, and Tiger Strikes Asteroid, New York; Musée de la Fraise and Ruschman, Berlin, Germany; Netwerk Aalst, Aalst, Belgium; Krabbesholm Højskole, Skive, Denmark; / Slash, San Francisco, CA; DePaul Art Museum and Queer Thoughts, Chicago, IL; Mary + Leigh Block Museum of Art, Evanston, IL; Elmhurst Art Museum, Elmhurst, IL; and the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH. Morris writes prolifically about art, perfume, and culture for numerous journals, exhibition monographs, and websites. Morris is a transplant from southern Louisiana who holds a BFA from the Art Academy of Cincinnati and earned an MFA in Art Theory + Practice from Northwestern University, as well as a Certificate in Gender + Sexuality Studies. In 2017 Morris earned a Certification in Fairyology from Doreen Virtue, PhD. Morris is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. www.mattmorrisworks.com