The Jancar Jones Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibit of work by Chadwick Rantanen. The show will include work in a variety of media, installed “without touching the gallery.” Drawn from the nostalgia of his youth and upbringing as a Jehovah’s Witness, Rantanen’s selection of work will engage aspects of the system in which he grew up while illustrating the ways that he addressed such regulations.
Including paintings on paper, mixed media sculptures and video, the work will be shown on a carpet cut vaguely to the size of the gallery. By using a surface whose boundaries will instead contain the work, Rantanen will attempt to dissolve the prescribed relationship between his work and its environment. By creating intermediaries between the work and the gallery, Rantanen not only divorces his practice from the space in which it is exhibited but paradoxically draws attention to that which is being abandoned. The work in the show is given a mobile context in which to reside as a sort of step away from a reliance on the architectural space in which it is placed. Furthered in his black and white video compilation of the most austere scenes from National Geographic documentaries, the question of “neutrality” is raised not only in the installation but also in the work itself.
Chadwick Rantanen received his BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. His work has most recently been exhibited at Artists Space in New York, Homie Gallery in Berlin, and Southern Exposure in San Francisco.