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Not For Sale: Susan Giles in a group exhibition at Dominican University’s O’Connor Art Gallery

Jan 22, 2014

Dominican University’s O’Connor Art Gallery presents Not For Sale, an exhibition featuring artists Jenna Caravello, Susan Giles, and Ryan Mandell. Each artist utilizes architecture in their creative process revealing the complexity of the structures that surround us.

Jenna Caravello’s hand-drawn animations focus on the domestic settings that buildings create. Her characters rely on sparse narratives that place them in situations varying from the whimsical to the alarming.

The paper sculptures and altered videos made by Susan Giles come to us from the perspective of a tourist or traveler affected by an unfamiliar culture. Giles’ work reveals that even in your native tongue, language can still be a barrier in describing a magnificent structure.

Ryan Mandell studies the traditional fundamentals of contemporary architecture. He then creates sculptures that challenge the use of these foundational rules and how they may fail to acknowledge the social impact of architecture on a society.

Curated by Angela Bryant

About the Artists

Jenna Caravello:
Jenna Caravello is an artist and filmmaker living in Chicago. Born in Los Angeles, she studied animation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and decided to stay, having bought so many coats.
Caravello recently spent two years as a Media Archivist for Kartemquin Films (Hoop Dreams, The Interrupters). She runs a video production label called Dikarya and makes music videos for Chicago musicians that can be found on The Fader, Impose, and Noisey webpages. The Room With No Corners (2011) recently screened at the Chicago Underground Film Festival, Eyeworks Experimental Animation Festival, the Melbourne International Animation Festival, and toured Australia and Europe with the Australian International Animation Festival. Her current endeavor is to finish a new animated film by 2015.

Susan Giles:
Susan Giles is an artist working in sculpture and video. She teaches in the Department of Art, Media and Design at DePaul University in Chicago. She has a MA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a MFA from Northwestern University. Giles’ work has shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, The Renaissance Society in Chicago, Santa Monica Museum of Art in California, and Kunsthalle Goeppingen in Germany, among others. She has received several grants, including a 2009 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship Award for Visual Arts, a 2005 Louis Comfort Tiffany Award and a 1998 Fulbright Grant to Indonesia to conduct research on the intersection of tourism and culture in Bali.

Ryan Mandell:
Ryan Mandell earned a Master’s degree in Fine Art(Sculpture) from Indiana University and a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Art(Drawing) from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. Before joining UW-Milwaukee as Assistant Professor and Area Head of Sculpture in 2013 Ryan taught at the University of North Texas, Pennsylvania State University, and Boise State University. His work, which is informed by research in the fields of architecture and urban planning, has been exhibited extensively across the U.S. and internationally, including past shows in Chicago, Dallas, Albuquerque, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Grand Rapids, Budapest, and Berlin, including a recent solo exhibition with the Institute of Contemporary Art, Baltimore. He is a recent recipient of an Idaho Commission on the Arts and National Endowment for the Arts grant, and his work has been recognized by Time Out Chicago Magazine, Baltimore City Paper, The Chicago Tribune, and Sculpture Magazine.Â