Last Minute Plans: Two New Exhibitions Open At Kavi Gupta

By Julia Weeman in Arts & Entertainment on Feb 9, 2013 8:00PM

Two new exhibitions are opening today at Kavi Gupta: Johanna Billing: 'I'm Gonna Live Anyhow Until I Die' in the main gallery and Matthew Metzger: 'Waver' in the project space. Billing's films "weave music, movement, and rhythm - placing subtle emphasis on the individual within representations of changing societies." Her most recent film is set in Rome and originated from a project to mark the 150th anniversary of the Unification of Italy.

Billing directs the participants in her films, but they all play themselves as they participate in staged situations that "oscillate between documentary and fiction." The main characters in this film are five children who abandon their parents to run around the streets of Rome until they come across an abandoned school. The children begin to play with obsolete tools and instruments, eventually composing black shapes that resemble Rorschach tests.

Billing used Rome as source material and references Italian Neorealism and psychoanalytical workshop techniques. She visited Rome during the demonstrations against university reforms in the fall of 2010 and began to focus the work on the future of the younger generation and the populist political party. The soundtrack features a Romany violin, upright bass, whistling and improvised interpretations of the songs Cariocinesi and Mechanics, originally written by Italian progressive experimentalist Franco Battiato.

'Waver' is Matthew Metzger's first exhibition with Kavi Gupta and will feature three works that "stem from his ongoing inquiry into Abstraction, and its relationship to the copy as a way of positioning painting between the limits of figuration and the sign." Now known as Apparition, a work that was originally exhibited as Ghost at the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, it still has the marks and scrapes it received as museum-goers leaned against it and brushed its surface. The other two works explore the relationship between a sign and what supports it.

The opening reception for of Johanna Billing: 'I'm Gonna Live Anyhow Until I Die' and Matthew Metzger: 'Waver' is today from 4 - 7 p.m. Kavi Gupta Gallery is located at 835 W. Washington and gallery hours are Tuesday-Friday from 10 a.m. - 6 p.m. and Saturday from 11 a.m - 5 p.m.