Materials, skiing and a new winter residence

Last weekend, we had brunch with Liam and Kat and then went to a new exhibit that is getting a lot of attention here, called The Allure of Matter: Material Art from China. Liam has been interested in this new gallery space in Lincoln Park, and when they saw that this exhibit was coming early in 2020, they got us all tickets to go see the exhibit. The other half of the show is at the Smart Museum at the University of Chicago, so we hope to see that part too!

The space and exhibit are both really amazing. The sculpture was large scale and featured artists working in very unusual materials. Half of the 2nd floor was covered with small porcelain “flames” placed on the floor. It made the viewer very focused on where to step!

This coil is a long sheet of thick rubber, with nails driven through, then rolled up.

It’s really beautiful and the amount of human work that went into it is pretty astounding.

This artist collected roof tiles from an area where the traditional buildings were demolished (I think in Shanghai) and arranged them on concrete blocks on the floor, with photographs of places that had been in that area in the past on the roof tiles. Thought Rory and other fans of the Lincoln Park Zoo might like the polar bear!

This installation involved paper hung to form a big sweeping shape that filled one of the upper level rooms. That’s Liam and Kat sitting on the bench at the end.

And the following work was described as a collaboration between artist and silkworms, which were trained to cover these large metal chain links with woven silk.

Thanks, Liam and Kat for bringing us there! Meanwhile, while we were enjoying the Chinese art that came to us, Miles went on another college outdoors trip, this time cross country skiing at Mount Hood near Portland. So pretty! Miles said that cross country skiing is a real workout and his arms and legs were very sore after! But it was a lot of fun.

Also last week, Debbie had a flight to Portland and she and Miles had a chance to meet up for Thai food for dinner!

We had a move of sorts this weekend – readers may have heard about our plans to establish a seating area in our upstairs to take advantage of the bright sunny landing area and also work with our house’s natural warmer temps upstairs as a better place to hang out in the colder months. Our furniture arrived and we have spent the weekend enjoying what we’re now calling the Winter Residence 🙂

Readers may also recognize the chair design from our living room. We really like these chairs! And an interesting thing about the Winter Residence, we found that just going to a different room in the house can feel like a real journey! However, with temps at 60F / 16C today, we did want to be sure to get out too, so we walked through Humboldt Park to the 606 and walked west to the trailhead. It’s really a pretty section of the 606, with a lot of trees already grown in that provide a lot of shade in summer. We also passed this sculpture showing eyes of different endangered birds. Hope that’s not too low a note to end on, on the up side there were so many people out on the 606 today awareness was certainly raised!