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Danielle Gustafson-Sundell
it's midnight and i'm lonely

Exhibition Dates: June 29 - August 11, 2007

it's midnight and i'm lonely, 2007
felt, corduroy, denim, glue, staples, nails
dimensions variable
installation view, detail

Kavi Gupta Gallery is pleased to present the second solo exhibition of Chicago-based artist Danielle Gustafson-Sundell titled it’s midnight and i’m lonely. The exhibition consists of wall-based text made from various fabrics which depict slogans, musings and provocations borrowed from WW2 to the present. The show is accompanied by sound specifically written, performed and produced for it’s midnight and i’m lonely by Victor Thompson. The artist has also utilized the project room for a curated exhibition titled if that was all needed i’d be fine, and includes work by Stephanie Brooks, Anna Conway, Andreas Fischer, Carrie Gundersdorf, Andy Moore, Chris Naka, Keiler Sensenbrenner, and Tony Tasset.

Danielle Gustafson-Sundell’s exhibition features over 80 text phrases plastering the walls of the gallery space. Each phrase is cut from commonplace utilitarian textiles such as felt, wool, denim, or corduroy and is plucked from sources that range from t-shirts, bumper stickers, buttons, handbills, posters, and placards that
the artist has collected over the years. The proclamations vary from propaganda, subtle sarcasm, biting commentary and witty innuendos to forthright pleads such as “save the whales”. The purposeful placement of sentiments such as earnestness next to apathy, outrage above irony, narcissism coupled with social consciousness, do-gooder following hedonist, and on and on, addresses the open ended re-interpretation and re-contextualization which implicates and invites the viewer to answer the question: How do I participate?

The phrases are remade as replicas from the original design, where the scale, color, and typeface vary in as much as the hand-reinterpretation of the originals makes for imperfect, personalized declarations. The words chosen are predominantly written by and for the people, for better or worse, and this personal passion is reiterated by the artist’s choice of remaking these signs in a way that reflects the historically craft-based, folk manner in which groups of people – families, churches, schools and political groups - would get together around a common table with tons of fabric, glue, paint and staples to create these mantras of commonality and often protest.

These public declarations are expressions of fascinating forms of found vernacular, folk art, historical artifacts, and exist now as contemporary cultural reflection. They are someone’s opinions, beliefs or ideas available to be embraced, rejected or ignored. Believing and the struggle of defining one’s voice is a lonely, melancholy task.

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Danielle Gustafson-Sundell was born in Minnesota and lives and works in Chicago, IL. Gustafson-Sundell has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and Kavi Gupta Gallery. Selected group exhibitions include shows at David Risley Gallery, London; The Moore Space, Miami; Harris Gallery, University of LaVerne, CA; FRESH, The Altoids Curiously Strong Collection, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY .

Danielle Gustafson-Sundell
tomorrow
Exhibition Dates: March 5 - April 24, 2004

check out the sky, man, (let's never go anywhere else #2), 2004
box, pole, sand, wool, 70's needlepoint flowers, thread
7.5" x 8.5" x 80"

Danielle Gustafson-Sundell's sculptures from the past few years have confronted the formal side of sculpture with the placement of soft forms against hard-edged geometric shapes. Ideas of minimalism influenced the placement of construction materials such as cement blocks, bricks and 2x4's, which were conversely softened by the addition of stitched, and appliquéd fabrics like felt and corduroy and titled to imply narratives that often involved love and sex. Danielle Gustafson-Sundell's current body of work titled tomorrow comments less on feminizing minimal sculpture but rather explores a personal agenda focusing on emotional themes such as loss, love and relationships. This collection of sculptures and wall pieces reference a 1970's aesthetic as a metaphor for a failed utopic model and a familiar harbinger of what is to come. The sculptures now pair found objects with a hand-made thrift store craft reaching from unlikely motifs such as patchwork, iron-on, sand-art and tattoo design. The work presents a distinct longing to recapture a certain place, time or moment in which the artist has lost.

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Danielle Gustafson-Sundell (b. 1967, Minnesota) lives and works in Chicago. She has exhibited solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 12x12 New Artists/New Work, and Vedanta Gallery. She has also been included in exhibitions at Gallery 400, University of Illinois at Chicago, and The Evanston Arts Center. Her work is included in the Altoids Curiously Strong Collection, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY.

Project Room: Danielle Gustafson-Sundell
lovehole
Exhibition Dates: October 19 - November 24

lovehole, 2001(detail)
wood, bricks, can, felt, and thread
12" x 125" x 125"

Danielle Gustafson-Sundell's first solo exhibition titled lovehole puts sex and feminism into minimalist sculpture. Stacked cement blocks, bricks and 2x4's, are softened by the delicate, obsessive stitching and applique; of felt, corduroy and velour. The objects in their new dress constantly reference the body. An empty tin can is delicately lined with plush colorful felt, and suggestive zippered bulges appear squished between the weight of the cement blocks. Old, worn clothing is "reconstructed" spread open and sprawling, wearing its orgasmic rays on its sleeves and nailed to the wall. Also present metaphorically is the emotional self, the one that feels and wishes. It is incomplete and whole, sheds unreal glittery tears, loves as earnestly as the best pop song, and always naively subscribes to the real thing.

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Danielle Gustafson-Sundell lives and works in Chicago. She has recently exhibited in Off the Wall at Gallery 400 in Chicago, The Block Museum in Evanston, IL, and is included in the Altoids Curiously Strong Collection. This June she will present a solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago in the 12 x12 New Artists/New Work series.

Danielle Gustafson-Sundell, tomorrow
Vedanta Gallery
By ZAK MUCHA

As a graduate student painting at Northwestern University, Danielle Gustafson-Sundell struggled with layers of paint that couldn't express the ideas in her head. Her instructors watched as she tried to squeeze her images onto two-dimensional planes. Then came the breakthrough. The artist stitched a brick inside a homemade stocking cap. She sewed more bricks inside other materials--clothing, pantyhose--and piled them on the floor. Gustafson-Sundell said at the time, "The act of making a hard brick into a soft object is about nurturing something that shouldn't be nurtured."

The juxtaposition of soft forms against hard-edged geometric shapes has been the confrontational point of Gustafson-Sundell's work. It's echoed in her abstractions, materials, and her reference points in time. The result is a memory test for the viewer. Looking at her art, the viewer knows something's not right--some image or object belongs somewhere else in the walk-a-day personal lexicon. Cement blocks and corduroy, bricks and felt are stitched and wrapped around each other under narrative titles reminiscent of sex or childhood.

Gustafson-Sundell's current show, Tomorrow, adorning the walls at the West Loop's Vedanta Gallery through April 24, confronts the barest slipping of memory--not the slipping away of memory, but those tiny visual clues that spark a point in a person's history, allowing a flood of scenes and images to come to you. A little pinprick hole in the stream and all this stuff comes pouring out.

Conduct a brainstorming drill with the 1970s as the target and you'd get lists of lame '70s bands, junk TV shows, kid's toys, and cars actually made of metal. Ask a Chicago kid, and we'll recall "The Ray Rayner Show" on mornings before school and "Son of Svengoolie" on Saturdays before watching boxing matches with our dads. Kitsch is easy--there's nothing to get upset about, nothing to think about. You recognize it, have a laugh, and move on.

Pop culture doesn't fit through the holes Gustafson-Sundell punctures in your memory, even though the viewer is well aware of the time period she is thinking of. Kitsch from the 1970s has been around long enough that a terrible old cop show is remade into a major motion picture, cashing in on that "weren't-we-dorks?" nostalgia processed twice for the postmodern consumer and acknowledged by the movie studio: "Hey, we're in on the joke, too. Now gimme your money."

Nothing is so plain-spoken or straightforward in Gustafson-Sundell's work as that mass-market mugging. The recognition is hard won, coming from those little fractures of memory fallen out of their proper context but bringing the viewer into the middle of a scene out of time. In her piece "Check out the sky, man (let's never go anywhere else #2)," the viewer gets dropped right in the middle of what could be some couple's moment of bliss before the weighted truth of a long relationship unfolds. The piece itself is a box covered with wool needlepoint flowers, the pattern reminiscent of a homemade pillow cover. You want to reach down and touch it, but the two 4-foot poles extending from opposite sides of the box suggest this isn't to be handled. In fact, the object may need to be carried by two people, each holding one end of the pole--as if the box is too heavy or too delicate, or else cannot bear the jostle of one person carrying it alone. Even if just one person were to carry it, the logistics of maneuvering 8 feet of pole through doorways and into cars and elevators is unwieldy at the very least. As if the powers that be tell those of us foolish to try hauling Gustafson-Sundell's piece around, "If that's what you want, here you go." Have a needlepoint-covered box with an 8-foot pole running through the middle. The title itself is a conversation--two people on the verge of making a decision. And Gustafson-Sundell gives her audience the representative artwork, an awkward object that is ostensibly pretty, but a bit mysterious. What, if anything, is inside the box? There is no saccharine nostalgia here; this is two young people who've decided, "Let's never go anywhere else" before they come to the new question, a morning or a month later: "What now?" Any nostalgia attached to the work is completely individual and, therefore, tinged with a certain sadness. Any kitsch is absent or brought by the viewer. The object might as well be from a god that says, "Oh? You're happy? Carry this for a while." Another piece, a patchwork quilt hanging on the wall at Vedanta--a tiger, fangs bared and leaping forward--is a more common image, one the viewer remembers last seen possibly airbrushed on the side of a Ford Econoline decked out as a party van. The image, transferred to a hand-stitched quilt, doesn't settle until the viewer can say, "Oh, yeah. Kenny had one of those," and is left with the same longing, wishing they were at that point in their life when logic demanded you could look at the sky and seriously suggest, "Let's never go anywhere else, man."