Here And There Pink Melon Joy
Sculptures by Sabina Ott, in Chicago Cultural Center, East Washington Street, Chicago, ILChicago, IL
Ott’s vision of candy-hued icicles as hanging lamps is a welcome reverie in a city with so much dirty snow. The sculptures on view are embedded with round mirrors, dead clocks, exposed light bulbs, plastic and real houseplants, drums, and drum music composed by artist Joe Jeffers, whose rhythm echoes the ticktock beats of the bucket drummers on the adjacent Michigan Avenue. Like a funhouse, “here and there pink melon joy” takes visitors on a momentary journey; in three galleries Ott leads us through her versions of hell, purgatory, and paradise in a nod to Dante’s Divine Comedy. The show culminates with the video installation to perceive the invisible in you, 2012, a swirling tangle of ecstatic love poems by Rumi, William Blake, and Gertrude Stein among others projected on four walls.
Ott succeeds in building her own sort of Fantasyland. It’s a place where, like a Disney movie, objects might come alive to play with and protect you. But this dream is no escape from reality; Ott builds the type of world she wants us to live in. (from Jason Foumberg’s review in Artforum, December, 2014)
Meet the Creator
"Sabina Ott is known for her broad range of work—from painting to installation to sculpture—and her central role in the art world as teacher, administrator, and recently, as the founder of the exhibition space Terrain, which invites artists to create installations and performances using the exterior of her Oak Park home. She earned both her BFA and MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Exhibiting since 1985, Ott has participated in over 100 solo and group exhibitions at institutions in Sao Paulo, Brazil; Auckland, New Zealand; Melbourne, Australia; and many cities across the US. Her work is included numerous institutional collections including The Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Oakland Museum of Art. Critically, her work has been reviewed in Art in America, Art Forum, The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times, among other publications. In 2015, Sabina Ott was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and has completed a public art commission for the Chicago Transit Authority. Recent large scale installations have been mounted at solo exhibitions at the Bedford Gallery, Hyde Park Art Center and the Chicago Cultural Center. Sabina resides in Chicago where she is a Professor of Art at Columbia College Chicago."
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