Apr 7th 2023

Pia Cruzalegui / Elaine Luther

@ Ignition project space

3839 W Grand Ave, Chicago, IL 60651

Opening Friday, April 7th, from 6PM - 9PM

On view through Saturday, April 29th

The gallery will be open all day on 4.7 starting at 12pm.
Exhibition runs from 4/1 – 4/29 with gallery hours every Saturday from 12-5pm. Join us for the launch of our 2023 season!

Pia Cruzalegui
Pia is a trained filmmaker and multimedia producer, a self-taught photographer, mixed media artist, painter, and curator. Since very early in her career she was attracted to experimental forms and films, and it took no time to realize the ephemerality and potential of video as an art medium. Pia has always been interested in the manipulation of images and the temporality of video and sound in an art space to explore other possibilities of narrative and other ways of seeing, listening and experiencing art. In 2014 Pia was invited to curate time-based media works at the Zhou B. Art Center. For a period of 18 months, while she worked through her graduate degree, she organized and curated new media art works into the art center’s Third Friday monthly program. Since then, curating spaces and opening opportunities to emerging artists has been a joyous exercise. Pia is also the founder and director of Twisted Oyster, a film and new media festival, and has continued to collaborate in diverse projects and art spaces.

Pia holds a BA in Video, Film and Multimedia from Florida Atlantic University and has an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Pia was given a recognition award by the Ministry of Culture and Heritage of Quito, Ecuador, for her work Rojo Rosa Rosado, in 2019, and her video documentation project, “American Tales in the Making” (2020), funded by the National Endowment of the Arts Big Read, was commissioned by and archived at the Freeport Art Museum, in Illinois. ​​​​​​​ Pia Cruzalegui was born in Peru. She lives and works in Chicago where she works as an artist, curator and producer.

Elaine Luther
Balance & Tension

How do you get people to appreciate the work you’re doing when they’re benefiting from your labor, yet not noticing that you’re doing it? Women’s work, their physical labor, emotional labor, often goes unpaid, underpaid, unnoticed and under-appreciated.

With this artwork, I try to get people to notice by making it beautiful, by drawing people in, to look more closely. I collect vintage, handmade doilies, in order to print them as photograms using light sensitive dye. Though most people think of lace and doilies as out of style and boring, once they’re transformed into blue and white, people find them captivating.

These are printed on vintage hankies, with themselves have crocheted edges, so the handwork of unknown women shows up again and again the work, layer upon layer. That the women are unknown, that their work was sold, cheaply, or given away, is another aspect that I’m commenting on in my work.

Beyond the blue and white, the show includes real, skeletonized leaves, which have been collaged with bits of handwritten letters received by the artist over the years. Fragments of conversation, of long ago gossip, are captured in these leaves. Letters, expressions of love and reports from back home, from those now dead, or contact lost, are all hinted at in bits and pieces on leaves.

These text fragments on leaves are about former selves, old identities, and also symbolize family ties, relationships, and the emotional labor usually performed by women.

I most overtly address unpaid labor through collages that include actual time cards, referencing paid work, in contrast to unpaid care work.

Taken all together, viewers take in the range of labor women perform to create a home life for others, raise children, keep connected with family near and far, all while maintaining her own friendships, interests and life. The hope is that by drawing people in with beauty and mystery, they will reflect on the issue of labor in their lives and the lives of those around them.

Bio
Elaine Luther is an artist whose work explores death, motherhood and doing the dishes. She finds that the more honest she is in her art, the more others can connect with it. Her art has been exhibited nationally and internationally, notably in Chicago at Woman Made Gallery and in London. Solo shows include Harold Washington Library, Chicago, and Northern Illinois University’s Backspace Gallery and multiple micro-galleries, including two in the U.K. Her essay and artwork are included in the forthcoming book, An Artist and a Mother by Tara Estrada Carpenter, et al. Her artwork has been featured in Professional Artist Magazine (print), UPPERCASE magazine (print) and Quaranzine (online) and included in the Quarantine Quilt online project by Tal Fitzpatrick.
She has been interviewed for Articles in the following print publications: Studio P. Authority on Jewelry Manufacturing (AJM), Bead and Button, and The Crafts Report. She has been profiled on JCKOnline, Library as Incubator Project blog, the Arts Business Institute website. She lives in Chicagoland with her family, where she’s also the gallerist for a series of 12” x 12” box galleries where she puts on serious shows of miniature art.

Image: Pia Cruzalegui

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