Sibling Revelry

Zeitgeist is pleased to present Sibling Revelry, bringing together Nashville-based artist Lanie Gannon, for the first time in a two-person show, with her brother, Chicago-based artist, Jamie Gannon. Opening reception November 2, 5-8pm. On view Nov 2-30, 2024.

About Lanie Gannon:

I like to think that the sum of our knowledge is expressed through the physical experience of handiwork; that the connection between hand and instinct carries the history of our cumulative experiences. I have come to recognize that later in life, this connection between experience and an intuitive approach to making art gains strength and certainty. The hand + mind connection offers us the possibility to reimagine and shape remembrances and workaday experiences. It is a creative source that continually rolls out ideas and makes room for more discovery. It also allows me, personally, to revisit my early, youthful practices in art and design, and to borrow from the original, rudimentary lessons in color, shape, and form. This reemergence of lessons from my early years surprises me. As I have matured, so has my understanding of the fundamentals of art.

I originally expressed my artistic concerns through sculptural and figurative pieces made from wood. Many years were spent years paying attention to the figure, to assembling and carving heads and bodily forms. More recently paper has become my chosen medium, taking on more colorful and energetic visual expression. These paper abstractions are like microcosms of my previous, more figurative, work, exposing its internal structures and inner workings. My work continues to exhibit a playfulness; this playfulness belies a more serious assessment of our social world, however. I am interested in how something that is initially perceived as frivolous and celebratory can constitute a reaction against and resistance to the shadowy world of misfortune, hard luck, and weariness.

Working with paper is all about immediacy, simplicity, and practicality. Paper is economical, portable, and quiet. The tools are readily available: hole punches and scissors, along with fasteners, clips, snaps, tape, glue, and paint. Paper also lends itself to improvisation. It can be so delicate that it retains the imprint of memory, and so strong and versatile that its materiality exists in a realm between fabric and wood.

Lately, my work is migrating from the flat surface, and beginning to occupy more space. I’m experimenting with new and surprisingly endless construction methods and colors. By using strips, lengths, and various thicknesses of paper, I can overlap, weave and fasten it together, as if it is a skin. I also feel I am shaping the paper to support, contain and protect the in- tangible— like scaffolding or a skeletal structure. It is a means of simultaneously bestowing materiality on the “invisible,” while allowing it to continue hiding.

About Jamie Gannon:

Defamiliarized Perspectives and Distributed Attention

When you become accustomed to the things around you they stop seeming extraordinary. I attempt to make architecture and objects 'unfamiliar,' to make forms oddly beautiful, and to increase the duration of a viewer's perception. The process of perception is an interesting aesthetic end in itself and deserves to be prolonged. If we start to examine the general laws of perception we see that as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic. Seeing common things in unfamiliar and strange ways allows us fresh perspectives and helps us see the world in new and greater detail.

Documenting “place” is another aspect of my work that is very important. The precise locations provided with each work add an element of reality that brings into focus the credibility of the original photographs as a recorded archive. Many of the structures I look for are endangered as time inevitably progresses and their utility wanes. Capturing these buildings as completely as possible from all sides is a concerted effort. Presenting the art derived from the original source photos with two sides mirrored gives the viewer an intentionally unfamiliar viewpoint. At the same time the viewer, with prolonged attention, is informed in a way that a single-sided depiction could never provide.

Jamie Gannon works and lives in Chicago, Illinois.