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Alex Chitty + Unison Review on Chicago Artist Writers

Many thanks to Zsofi Valyi-Nagy for her insightful review of the Alex Chitty collaboration with Unison! Here is a short excerpt! 

Click here to read the full review.

While previous Unison collaborations have reinforced the utility of beautiful objects made for the home, Chitty reinterprets functionality. Her towel-size sculptures cannot absorb water, and her scans of candelabras and drinking glasses only exist as abstract compositions. These objects are deconstructed, even obscured, leaving us with constituents of their original designs. From the surface, we could claim that as Design is flattened, reconfigured, decontextualized, and finally stripped of its everyday functionality, it becomes Art.

Chitty’s pieces complicate such an easy delineation between art and design. To simply evaluate their lack of functionality is irrelevant to their intrigue. Their success as art objects relies heavily on the deconstruction of their underlying design elements. Inside Unison, art and design inform one another, and as Chitty flattens and alters the designed objects – her “collaborators” – this tension collapses neatly upon itself.
— Zsofi Valyi-Nagy for Chicago Artist Writers

 

 

Alex Chitty + Unison

I recently had the honor and great pleasure of curating a collaborative project with artist Alex Chitty for Unison Home, in Chicago. 

Alex Chitty alters found images and objects in sculptural and photographic arrangements that play on expectations of functionality and a sense of the familiar. From January 22 to February 21, 2015, Unison's Wicker Park store will serve as a temporary site for material experiments that parallel ongoing ideas in the artist's studio practice. Alex has selected domestic goods from Unison's spring collection to alter, deconstruct, and reinstall in new compositions that reference, but are removed from, their original utility.

Alex Chitty's work will be on view and for sale at Unison Home, 1911 W. Division Street, Chicago, IL through February 21, 2015.