Opening in the Plane
Kamille Kirschling + Josephine Dorsey-Lauck
With Performance-Activation by Ruby Que + Hesam Salehbeig
December 7, 2024 - January 11, 2025
Opening in the Plane brings together the practices of photography, weaving, and sculptural installation in an exploration of the dynamic interaction between interior and exterior spaces, capturing the rhythm of presence and absence. In the words of the artists: “Emerging from a desire to interrogate the ephemeral quality of existence through spatial experiences, this body of work investigates momentary compositions created within the home, inviting contemplation of how homes function as living, breathing sculptures that host our daily lives. The intimate relationship one cultivates with sunlight entering one's home becomes a personal and immersive experience. Yet, as these constructions transition from their private environments to the gallery, they transform into a broader sequence, recounting their origin in subverted and abstracted ways.”
ARTIST BIOS
Kamille Kirschling (b. 2002) lives and works in Chicago, IL. They received their BFA from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago in 2024. Inspired by the bodily memory held within houses and domestic spaces, they work with photography, sculpture, and installation to interpret how memories are experienced through time. Due to the 2008 financial crisis, they experienced housing insecurity that resulted in frequent moving and ever-evolving family dynamics. This shaped their interest in the false promise of suburban housing developments and the ever-increasing lack of accessibility of home ownership within the United States. They are drawn to photography for its ability to distort a reality within one's perception and question the inherent idea of truth within the medium, of how it exists as a document of change.
Josephine Dorsey-Lauck is a textile artist based in Chicago, Illinois. Through weaving, sewing, and drawing, she creates textural compositions that evoke familiar, yet abstracted, scenes of everyday life. Her work emphasizes the hand—particularly in moments where the process of making reveals its failures. This focus on craft versus creation allows the work to exist in an ambiguous space, somewhere between cloth, garment, painting, and something else entirely. Josephine graduated from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago with a BFA in Fiber and Material studies.
CURATORIAL STATEMENT - KAT BAWDEN
What is the lifespan of a home? What happens when the home you knew no longer includes you? What residue of us remains in place, and how do we carry that place with us? How do we reconcile the concept of home when a place is not ours to begin with?
Kamille Kirschling grew up in the shadow of the 2008 financial crisis. Her family experienced housing insecurity that resulted in frequent moves. From an early age, Kamille experienced the false promise of housing accessibility in the U.S., and questioned what and where home can be found. The wooden structures in this show are reconstructed walls from houses that Kamille’s family built, temporarily lived in, and moved away from. They are the inner structures, the bones of what constitute the spaces that we call our homes. What does it mean to build, then lose, one’s home?
And what does it mean to reconstruct one’s home, but in a state of perpetual incompleteness? Like the walls, Kamille’s photographs in this exhibition are frozen semi-reconstructions. Kamille prints photographs of the half-constructed homes where they lived as a child, then installs these photographs in the apartment where they currently live, and photographs this installation. It is a flattening of time and place, distorted mirrors of past and present. I am reminded of Jacques Derrida’s question, “Does photography depict what is already present in the world, or does it create its own reality?”
While Kamille’s process freezes the birth of a structure, Josephine Dorsey-Lauck’s weavings are accelerated toward their end. Josephine is a textile artist who pushes the lifespan of her cloth, intentionally distressing her weavings in a way that animates them into living stories. Josephine’s vision for weaving extends beyond creating a singular textile, as she cuts and re-weaves and distresses her cloth, allowing it to transcend its own creation and take on the potential for narrative. They become tapestries of narrative and time, ambiguous in their lifespan, somewhere on a path of destruction.
With Josephine’s close observation and sensitivity to space, she designed her weavings to respond to the natural light of this gallery. The actual shadows and light from the windows in this room imprint upon the cloth, and at night, the weavings themselves become the windows. And weaving is architecture – the earliest human-made cloth was used to create structures, to act as walls.
Together, the exhumed walls of Kamille’s home become skeletons, draped in shrouds. Mourning and longing go hand-in-hand. During the installation of this show, the three of us were leaving the space and turned off all lights except one. And suddenly, the tone changed. The walls were threatening, their shadows sharp and black. The room was haunting, not at all a gallery, but an abandoned construction site. We had to walk carefully through the room, amidst wood, sawdust, photographs, and cloth. The room was alive now, and we were trespassing.
