ANDREW BARCO

ANDREW BARCO
MON 06.03 @ 7:30PM
dfb gallery
“PALE BLUE EYES”
www.andrewbarco.com
RP13 photos by Ahyun Kim
more on flickr

Andrew Barco (US) is an object-maker and performer living in Chicago. His work is concerned with the often strange and improbable ways ideas and habits can be transmitted across cultural landscapes and through time. With an MFA in sculpture from SAIC, Andrew’s work uses craft and industrial histories, quirky and edgy relational actions, and philosophical inquiry to create affective and thoughtful situations. He has presented major performance works at Mobius performance space and the Arnold Arboretum in Boston MA, and in Chicago, IL he has produced work at SAIC’s New Blood performance festival, Red Tape Theater’s Chicago Fringe Artists Networking Night, and at the DEFIBRILLATOR Performance Art Gallery.

One of the strange mysteries of human life is that we are the result of millions of chemical reactions and that somehow this mixture creates a being, an awareness that can question its own existence, dream of invisible divinities participating in its life, and plan epic symbolic constructions like cathedrals, pyramids, or flights to the moon. Contemporary sociologists like Bruno Latour encourage us to ignore the categories we put on the world and look for the productive networks that cut between natural and human constructions. Does the impossible divide between our base materiality and our highest aesthetic/philosophic ambitions start to crumble when we think about the philosophy happening at the level of chemical reaction or the poetry already being worked out in the communication and coordination of organs?

“Pale Blue Eyes” recreates the historic practice of the surgical theater to explore longing, memory, loss, and the search for truth. Surgical theaters, which began in enlightenment Italy to make public the scientific exploration of the body, by the eighteen hundreds were shows full of physical humor, poetry, and music. The patient in this case is a small cube of silicone dioxide created through a hydrolysis reaction to form a stable, brittle gel, called aerogel. This cube will be carved, over the course of the performance, into the shape of an eye. But like historical surgical theaters used as a precedent for this action, it is not what is being done that is important, but how, and with what?