Navy Pier Festival Hall Booth #480
600 E Grand Ave, Chicago IL
April 13 – April 16, 2023
VIP PREVIEW
Thursday, April 13 | 12pm–6pm
with Vernissage 6pm–9pm
GENERAL ADMISSION
Friday, April 14 | 11am–7pm
Saturday, April 15 | 11am–7pm
Sunday, April 16 | 11am–6pm
EXPO Chicago 2023
Can Circularity Save Us?
Navy Pier Festival Hall Booth #480
600 E Grand Ave, Chicago IL
April 13 – April 16, 2023
VIP PREVIEW
Thursday, April 13 | 12pm–6pm
with Vernissage 6pm–9pm
GENERAL ADMISSION
Friday, April 14 | 11am–7pm
Saturday, April 15 | 11am–7pm
Sunday, April 16 | 11am–6pm
Join us at EXPO Booth #480 for Can Circularity Save Us?
Can an individual or an exhibition halt increasing climate chaos? Who knows, but we will try. Using principles of circular design Adelheid Mers, Tria Smith, and Lan Tuazon demonstrate creative ways of (re)living. Through a range of interactive experiences, from trying on clothes to washing food packages, visitors are invited to rethink ideas about use, value, waste, and regeneration. We invite you to join us in a circular approach, as we reimagine how to innovate and recirculate by simply thinking and acting differently.
Tria Smith has created streetwear fashions that transform everyday materials from trash to couture. Visitors are invited to harvest and clean plastic waste, and wear the transformed clothes. Adelheid Mers engages visitors in conversations about strategies of circularity, and individual versus collective responsibility. Ideas and actions are recorded onto whiteboards to visualize and capture these ongoing conversations. Lan Tuazon designed the booth walls using Waterbricks, a revolutionary container system for people in need of bulk water and food, that join two deeply interrelated materials of the climate crisis – water and plastic – in secondary use.
“We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator,” continuing to drown in decades of linear thinking, in the midst of a fair selling shiny new objects. We simply ask what if we stopped wasting? The project provides a space for encounter, discussion, work, where flights of fancy are performed and actualized in the here and now, not in 2030 when we all become carbon neutral. By working together we can amplify and accelerate the imperative work of gathering, repairing, and regenerating. Through these collective interventions Can Circular Thinking Save Us? aims to counter extraction, destruction, and denial. We invite you to join us in an elegant circle of (re)purpose. Are you ready? Visit us in Booth #480. For more information, please visit 6018north.org/circularity.
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Adelheid Mers works through Performative Diagrammatics, a practice that includes elements of installation, facilitation with publics, and video. Her research draws on close work with others, exploring arts ecologies, and knowing differently, or epistemic diversity. Work takes place nationally and internationally, for example in residency, conference and exhibition settings. Educated at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and the University of Chicago, she is Associate Professor, chair of the department of Arts Administration and Policy, and in 2021/22, also interim chair of New Arts Journalism, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Mers currently co-leads the working group Performance & Pedagogy at PSi. For more information, please visit adelheidmers.org.
Tria Smith is an artist creating work that brings together performance, writing, and design to facilitate deep engagement and promote community. She trained as an actress at the Piven Theater, Interlochen, Oberlin, Northwestern University, and was a principal collaborator at Redmoon Theater since its inception. For 25 years Redmoon pursued Spectacle + Wonder through adaptations of great novels, pageantry + circus. They built shadow shows, blew fire, learned to stilt, took over streets, paraded in January and July. A strong desire to reach young people accompanied her work at Redmoon and she founded Dramagirls, a long-term creative mentorship for middle school girls on the West Side. Tria has an MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute. She creates programming and produces events at Guild Row Chicago, a social club for people who Give a Damn. She's the co-creator of The Persephone Project which uses the Myth of Persephone to create pageants on the land to address climate change. Tria’s work Trash Transformation was designed and built by: Tria Smith’s Trash Transformation: Wear the Street includes clothes and accessories co-designed and built by Alex McDermott; jackets and circle purses co-designed and made by Lilith Parker; accessories co-designed by KHÔI; trash-foraging bags by Declan Flynn; and performance by Freyja Acassi.
Lan Tuazon (born 1976, Pampanga, Philippines) lives and works in Chicago where she is an Associate Professor of Sculpture at the School of Art Institute in Chicago. Lan Tuazon has exhibited internationally at the Neue Galerie in the Imperial Palace of Austria, Bucharest Biennale 4, the WKV Kunstverein in Germany, and the Lowry Museum in London. Solo exhibitions of her work include the Brooklyn Museum and Storefront of Art and Architecture in New York, Youngworld, Inc in Detroit, Julius Caesar in Chicago, and the Visual Arts Center in Texas. She was awarded artist in residence and fellowships at the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Headlands Art Center, and Civitella Ranieri in Italy, and Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago. Group shows of her work have been exhibited (inter)nationally including 8th Floor Rubin Foundation, Artist Space, Redcat Gallery, Canada Gallery, Sculpture Center, Apex Art, Exit Art, WKV Kunstverein and Künstlerhaus in Stuttgart, Germany, Shiva Gallery, Essex Flowers, Momenta Art, and the Hyde Park Art Center. For more information, please visit lantuazon.com.
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6018North is an artist-centered, sustainable, non-profit platform and sustainable venue for innovative art and culture in Chicago. We challenge what art is, whom it’s for, and where and how it’s created. 6018North champions the creation of adventurous work that connects multiple disciplines and audiences while promoting artistic excellence. We support emerging and established local and international artists to create innovative, multidisciplinary work that connects artists and audiences in transformative ways. As a nimble lab for incubating, modeling, and experimenting, we leverage new ways of connecting artists and audiences to advance and sustain artists and Illinois’ creative ecosystem.
Can Circularity Save Us? is a part of ongoing research of sustainable strategies for a 2024 exhibition with Art Design Chicago, an initiative of the Terra Foundation for American Art investigating and elevating Chicago’s rich visual art and design histories and creative communities.
This program is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency through an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. This program is partially supported by a CityArts Grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs & Special Events. 6018North projects are partially supported by an anonymous donor advised fund at The Chicago Community Foundation, a CityArts Innovation Grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs & Special Events, a Gen Ops Plus Grant from the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, Field Foundation of Illinois, Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, IL Humanities, Illinois Arts Council Agency Youth Employment Grants, Joyce Foundation, The MacArthur Funds for Culture, Equity, and the Arts at the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, Terra Foundation for American Art, and individual donations. For more info visit us at 6018North.org.
Top image: A visitor participating in The Braid by Adelheid Mers.
Quoted above: U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres speaking at the COP27 climate change summit in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt. “We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator."