Join us Thursday, February 23, for the opening of Field Projects Show #3: Wise Blood. The works in this exhibition consider historical tracking, mapping, hunting, solitude, and backcountry self-reliance. Wise Blood draws on various histories; from mass-produced Americana to personal connections with cabins and nature. The title of the exhibition refers to Flannery O’Connor’s 1952 novel Wise Blood, which highlights eccentric self-reliance and exposes the disparities between rural and modern worlds. This exhibition features work by Christine Gedeon, Abraham McNally, Breehan James, Elissa Levy, and Matthew Craven.

Christine Gedeon creates sewn maps that abandon logical systems of mapping and show that our sense of place and reality originate in us individually. Gedeon’s plots create an unfamiliar impossible space that allow viewers to detach and contemplate their relationships to the external world—as though from an island or solitary encampment, one located deep in the mind. The work in this exhibition, Plotting Chelsea, begins with the space of Chelsea and Field Projects. Another artist concerned with ideal spaces, Abraham McNally employs sculpture to examine the millennial generation’s adoption and adaptation of back-to-the-land philosophies that emerged in the 1960s. McNally spent his early years in a small cabin built by his father, the kind of remote residence favored by 1960s radicals as an escape from American suburban conformity, consumerism, and politics. McNally’s work symbolizes the architectural remnants that the millennial generation inherited from baby-boomer radicals: a fascination with natural origin, land, craft, and solitude

Breehan James finds inspiration in her roots in the natural world, from deer hunting with her father to vacationing in the cabin shared by her family in Northern Wisconsin. Influenced by the hunting scenes of Courbet and early nineteenth-century Nordic landscape painting, James’s work captures the beauty and power of nature as well as the rudimentary self-reliance that grows with living off the land. Elissa Levy manipulates newspaper images of soldiers in order to restore a sense of life-blood to images meant for mass consumption. The figures in her work are brightly colored, like heat impressions on pieces of newspaper that seem to be slowing burning and crumpling. Her work retains an outsider quality, as she distorts contemporary military events as though tracing an unfamiliar conspiracy theory. Matthew Craven likewise draws upon historical images from American history, cavalry officers, and Native American design to create works that cross-reference appropriations of heritage and history. With his abstract imagery, Craven references American primitivism and historical plots with a nod to early land-based philosophies, raw materials, and origins.